MC HYLAND
CAPITALISM IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT
Zane texts “My retirement plan is societal collapse”
I did the applications but I was too tired to interview
This morning three different memes that say
“the work of local artists is not sitting on container ships”
From the empty advising office, I text Zane
“The dream position is ‘move to Berlin, freelance, learn German’”
“What a truly horrible time” writes the printer to Rebekah
When will paper come so they can print the books?
The same week I order paper directly from the mill
They email to say only one ream left Is there a ream still sitting
in a warehouse elsewhere? I look on other sites
Place orders with Staples The Paper Store each canceled the next day
No one knows what items on the website are actually for sale
The warehouses aren’t real Just-in-time delivery chains
The neighborhood co-op’s check for the farm co-op still sitting on my desk
I have to find the order number on one of four forms in my email
I have to put the forms in a folder on the shared drive
But I’m too busy liking posts from that bookstore in Glasgow
I order tiny vials of perfume from London
At the advice of Lightsey’s newsletter In this issue
Perfume recommendations an AI for grading papers
A partly legible to-do list that ends with “get therapy”
A sonnet that begins “My love for you leaves no trace
in the fossil record / not true.” The rush of affection this summer
To see Lightsey’s face in a little box on the computer screen
I go to the zoom group to talk about Cruel Optimism
In the backlit PDF’s maze I try to trace what meaning
I close my laptop I get into bed
The water stain on the ceiling pulses over me
I want it I want it Night puts me in its wet dark mouth
Essay on Ophelia
In the intermission we test the set, first feeling it for temperature, then gently knocking. Real mortar on false brick, though it takes a moment to be sure it’s not part of the armory building, a ruin in the center of the pristine wood floor. At the end of the play, each actor rises from the posture of death, still speaking. They drift behind a sliding glass door into an afterlife like the long wedding banquet in Act I. At first it’s hard to see who the veiled woman in the wedding dress is, dancing in Polonius’ arms. When she steps away and pulls back her veil, I shiver: a false note in the final chord.
I’ve never been satisfied by any performance of Ophelia. In this production she is more sexually knowing, at first, before spiraling into the gorgeous infancy of her madness. As a teenager, I loved mad Ophelia’s flowers; rue for remembrance, pansies for thoughts. In a footnote in Stephen Ratcliffe’s Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet, I find a translation of flowers to words, from an old book by George Farren:
But is Ophelia a maid, a blooming virgin, or is she something else? Madly, she sings of Saint Valentine’s Day, when an unnamed man Let in the maid, that out a maid / Never departed more. Scholars love to debate Ophelia’s virginity; Rebecca West writes The truth is that Ophelia wasa disreputable young woman, not scandalously so, but still disreputable. It’s not so much that adult Ophelia regresses to childhood as that the sexually active Ophelia of Act I gives birth to the singing, infantile Ophelia of Act IV.
How is the play different if Ophelia is pregnant, and running out of time before people know? How is the play different today than when I saw it three days before the Supreme Court ruling was announced? Her doubtful muddy death in that weeping brook could be an abortion gone wrong, like a punch in the stomach or fall down the stairs. Of course, people now living will die in these ways, as people have for hundreds of years.
The problem with every performance of Ophelia is that she’s a figment, an echo. If Hamlet is mad in craft after his father’s death, Ophelia is “really” mad after Hamlet kills her father. After Ophelia’s madness but before we see what she’s become, an unnamed courtier tells the Queen:
Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshapèd use of it doth move
The hearers to collection, they yawn at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts
Isn’t this a perfect description of theater: some words, words, words we hear and imagine into a world? Ophelia does what language does, but more. All the scholars arguing over the virginity of a person who never existed. I’ve done it too: in Ophelia I see myself, young and pregnant by a man who vanished into his own grief. I see the choice I made then, and the hundreds I didn’t have to make. I see the offstage river, clear and calm, and in its surface, the bright undersides of willow leaves.
In my forty-first year I reached a wall Some things
had stopped working Some questions I could no longer
When was I moving toward the world
(which would end) Some people had died
I did not know who language turned me to
or from I experienced a break
in form and in desire I needed more light I woke
before sunrise went outside into the cold pink sky
walked until I felt my body like a place
one might live heard a bird I could not see
in some undergrowth Or snow make a sound
like an engine a smaller sound than the factory
or the river up the path I saw a woman bring her face
to the face of her child touching It felt a long time
Notebook of soil raked up
After Mary Shelley
I was obliged to model this work
upon that which had grown
misshapen under the skin
*
obscure and chaotic
scattered and unconnected
frail and attenuated
unlettered and unfashioned
brute and noisy
haggard and squalid
tarnished and tattered
the tinsel and show
*
Suddenly everything was available
Suddenly everything could be burnt
They said at the memorial
I have always been alien
How to make and unmake the face
as though he passed through us
his eyes full of untraceable meaning
like radiation or fever
Our movement through time
no longer seemed to form a line
leading us to this unlikely room
*
In this sodden notebook I perform an address broken off over and over by miscommunication, by curious slippages of present into past. In the notebook the address can no longer be broken, but instead travels endlessly without reaching its destination. I believe I understood the syntax in which the dead man had placed me while he lived. But why call forth a ghost in order to say what could not have been said to the living? In our second to last meeting I touched his arm and felt sadness move like a shock through me. I left the photograph on the scanner. I distrusted the pronouns of address.
*
At night the notebook
gathered the spilt runoff
warping at its upper edge
In those days I wanted
to return to the visible world
crying in the coffeeshop
crying on the train
In the courtyard every word
became suddenly blazingly clear
*
A world which has averted
its once benignant face
*
I placed my hands on the box
containing the ash of his body
With a beating heart
I entered the enclosure
I placed my hands on the hands
of his ex-wife
To advance fearlessly into coming time
To tear from reality the mask
with which she had been clothed
*
A few months later the messages we exchanged through corporate-owned social media vanished, as did the scattering of his photographs and the messages people wrote addressing him in the month or two after his death. A hash of dead links. Certain messages remain undelivered no matter how often they are spoken or written. In his lifetime I was able to offer forgiveness but not to meet him where he rested in the moment of injury.
*
startled and pained
suppressed and hoarse
secret and faithful
now caressing and now tyrannizing
torn boughs, and marks of slaughter
*
In a dark room
in which no music is made
I stick a post-it note to the page
where I wrote the words he said
*
as if I had transmigrated into another form
and was worn to mere sound
*
The space between two people may not be a space at all, but instead a time to which either person needs to return if they wish to find the other. I did not know the person he later became, though I kept the figure of that person at the edge of my field of view. What can be said with confidence about another being? How speech turned to spectacle. As though the word you gestures, from the stage, to the action taking place tastefully behind the curtain.
*
Aligned wave crests and troughs
Not in eclipse, not in darkness and vacancy
and yet a cloud was upon our beauty
To touch the record sleeve
as his belongings were dispersed
To open every door and leave it open
in a new and brilliant light, too novel,
too dazzling for my human senses
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, and the author of over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books and two full-length books of poems: THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010). MC's third book, a collection of very short essays called The Dead and the Living and the Bridge, is forthcoming from Meekling Press in 2025. They live in St. Paul, MN with their partner and frequent collaborator, Jeff.