In my family group chat, we’ve taken a break from sending each other memes and other funny pictures. It started with a text from my mom, expressing her anxiety about the ever climbing far-right voting rate in France. She lives in a rural area, and most villages around her massively voted for Marine Le Pen, an Islamophobic, conservative presidential candidate.
“Why do I have such a visceral reaction when I see these same city halls raising Ukrainian flags?”, she texted. Perhaps because it reinforces Putin’s version of the story, in which Russia’s mission is to “denazify Ukraine and NATO,” we answered. Ukraine used as a symbol of nationalism. Or perhaps because these same city halls would never have raised a Syrian flag, a Libyan flag or a Palestinian flag—the list goes on.
In our 58th issue, Mariya Zilberman won the Winter Spring Contest with her poem “Civics Unit: Naturalization Test,” a powerful, irreverent rewriting of a U.S. citizenship test: “What is the rule of law? […] Eyes burn / outside the control line. Shelters open. / Not enough food arrives.” What does it mean to live in a world where objects have priority over humans when it comes to circulation?
“Civics Unit” is indeed a wonderful poem, but the poem that really caught my attention is “Essay on Anxiety,” which was published in the same issue and which can be read as the poetics of a panic attack or more generally as a poetic take on anxiety, lack of connection, and connectivity. In it I found an acute sense of contemporariness allied to ancient imagery, a feeling of estrangement, and a yearning for connection and peace so strong it infuses every word. “I sleep on my back, sync my breath to the car horn.”
Essay on Anxiety
Mariyah Zilberman
The song says there's a bee in my bonnet, a birdhouse
in my soul, but really, it's more like I'm wearing
a trombone as a hat: I can't see anything and everyone
sounds funny. The air is so cold, people on the Internet
toss boiling water and it turns into snow clouds. In my hair
I've woven a honeycomb and my ears are dizzy buzzing.
The only thing I ever say to my neighbor: I'm gonna reset
the wifi. Her response: Got it. This is the script of American
longing. When fresh powder falls under lamplight, I walk
into the street, ungloved, to wet my tongue on it. Three cold coins
dance in my lucky pocket. Corpse pose, I've heard, is a kind
of revival. I sleep on my back, sync my breath to the car horn.
