Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Nov/Dec 2020 |

Your Eyes Resemble Mine


Your Eyes

A very thin girl
prone to melancholia
became a very thin
middle-aged woman
prone to melancholia
but she was nonetheless
loved at first maybe
for her beauty
but eventually people
caught on to her tendency
to differentiate between
her failed mourning
and the potted palm
tree which looked
like the 19th century,
a pigment haunted
by chlorophyll, time
out of joint yet
radiant. “I thought,”
she said, “the gradient
faced the grave
and I couldn’t be
stopped like a train
jutting from the engraved
iris and ending in already
agreed upon cultural
production. Successful,
sure. Jubilant, no
doubt. Incantatory,
perhaps. But was it
anything worth
knowing? I have
seen it before, felt
it, heard it, known
it.” It was the suf-
fering of the crowd,
the wheezing that she
internalized, oh how
they loved her
because she was
the memory of those
very few who had
resisted turning
empathy into timed
protocols, or vani-
shing points woven
on the unreliable
horizon and thus
her flesh was the trace
of something bright,
enhanced, alien
like the shock
of the dead body
returned in an ochre
dream, the erotic
tripling of water,
lust, and tree.
It was a day like no
other, clocks hanging
off ghosts, the jumbled
messiah of notes,
refusal and the ash-
throated flycatcher
that just flew away.
Where had the bird
gone? Into the burnt
gyre, she reckoned.
She turned around
and around for the
possibility of growth.

Resemble

The truth is I wanted
to stay anonymous
yet I did not
receive enough Fit Points
from my phone to
give me a gold
medal today while
the deer click-clacked
up Shasta Road
drinking the blue-
green algae, tripping
on each other, on fire,
on the choir of toxic
salamanders, on
the Gemini moon,
as they climbed the maze
of neural pathways
of valve and daze
and maybe you
don’t believe in true
love because it
isn’t a distinct
enough transaction,
each movement, im-
pulse, sway
monetized the day
of labor, retreat
from labor, it is
Saturday 11:55 p.m.
and I’m here to
tell you the deer
were authentic
troubadours and may-
be so were we
just for a few
minutes crushed
between the cinder
block on the one-
way street, so
many times I meant
to call you but
troubles are very
private things
and sentimentality
is jealousy, the somber
roses. How hard
could it be to say
goodbye? Scrubbing
my face with dirt.
Am I ready? Goodbye,
morally speaking.
The abolition of the
family, the grotesque
forms of misery
and abuse you grow
too accustomed
to even push
back against
the way you
pushed me through
the doors of the 7-11,
albeit lovingly.
I have always been
humiliatingly
introverted, sur-
rounded by books,
deathly afraid,
and maybe this alone,
god I hope, resembles
something important.

Mine

“Nostalgia seduces
rather than convinces.”
Perhaps. I saw a picture
of the beige LA apartment
where your first
inner experience of time
was dealt like a bad
hand of cards. Then,
the floor of the casino
went wild, black
and red, seeing stars
that bled and you
turned toward
withered expectation
as a concept to fulfill.
I noticed “the weird
artifice of my
personality” blaring
from a boom box
on someone’s shoulder
who was Roller-
blading down
the amorphous
boardwalk. It was
always like I had
heard the song
before, even the songs
I knew I didn’t
know. The past
reduced me to
an animal crushed
into a ball on
the shag carpet
and I was sentenced
to repeat the lyrics
the same way
my sworn enemy
was so violent
and had called
my work. She was
as violent as her
bleached
hair. It is folly
to be ashamed
of desire, but also
folly to follow it.
Today is not the today
of decades ago and no
one has a boom box
on their shoulder.
It was a nice spring
and the bright earth
was climbing to
my ankles in water
and weeds. The trees
were happy because
it rained and the birds
were happy because it
rained and I was happy
because you got
away from the self-
surveillance mechanism
of our times. I saw you
running into I don’t
know, the same song
was playing from decades
ago I swear, but when
I looked at the sky
I saw you: gray, meteor-
logical, swirling nothing.
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