Alex Lemon - Feverland: A Memoir in Shards

Table of Contents

I give all of my love, all of myself to the people who made this book, this life possible. Ariane, Felix, Almayou are my everything. Im grateful to the amazing people at Milkweed Editionsyou are family, friends, and I so appreciate everything you do. Joey, this book owes an incredible amount to your crazy-good editing. The completion of this book was made possible by the generous support of TCU, which helped during the years it took to write this collection by awarding me a TCU-IS grant, a JFSRP grant, a Mid-Career Summer Fellowship, and a semester-long research leave. Thank you to my colleagues in the Department of English, especially our chair, Dr. Karen Steele, Dean of AddRan Andrew Schoolmaster, Dean Bonnie Melhart, Provost Nowell Donovan, Chancellor Victor Boschini (who always asks about the welfare of my family, and amazingly knows each of our names), and everyone associated with Ashland Universitys MFA program.

Big love to the editors of the following publications for editorial suggestions and for publishing these pieces, sometimes in different iterations:

AGNI: My Misogyny

Copper Nickel: Rabbit Hole Music

Gulf Coast: Becoming Animal: A History

Literary Review: EKG

River Teeth: How Long Before You Go Dry

Rumpus: King of the Rats

Southern Review: Heartdusting

Sycamore Review: Like So Many Nightmares

Photo Credit: Ariane Balizet

ALEX LEMON is the author of Happy: A Memoir, and the poetry collections Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, and The Wish Book. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, Gulf Coast, the Kenyon Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University and in Ashland Universitys low-residency MFA program in creative writing.

The Editors Circle of Milkweed Editions

We gratefully acknowledge the following individuals for their annual leadership support of the literary arts.

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.

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Interior design by Mary Austin Speaker
Typeset in Wilke

Wilke was designed by Martin Wilke in 1988 for the Linotype foundry. His design was inspired by classical inscriptions, the Caslon typeface and the Book of Kells. Its high x-height and round, broad letterforms make it extremely legible for setting book text.

I have seen such things as they occur in some remote and improbable time.

C. D. WRIGHT

I m trying to read poems, to find solace in language, but really Im just sitting in my living room with the TV on. BURN IN THE USA is stamped across the ticker of the ten o clock news. A slideshow of imagescharcoal drawings from the days Zacarias Moussaoui trialrun alongside it. I flick the TV volume up. Listen as the blindingly white teeth of the anchor snap and click over courtroom drawings, as audio of 911 calls crackles over the video everyone has seen a hundred times more than theyd like to: the jet vanishing into the thousand-eyed building, smoke billowing into the New York morning as leapers drop to the earth, dust-faced gawkers pointing at the shuddering tower as it begins to fold downward.

Cut back to the news desk. The newscasters stare wordlessly, motionlessly, into the camera for a second, then anotherso long the moment seems frozenuntil something signals the two to churn back to life. The woman turns to her coanchor. The camera zooms in on his mannequin face. Another death statistic drops woodenly from his mouth. I hit mute.

Above the TV, one of my stepfathers paintings hangs half-cocked, a beautiful landscape of bruised woods shrouded by night. The trees are Giacometti-like, black-and-blue apparitions. Slatherings of moonlight crawl between the trunks and branches. Often I imagine clambering into it. The moonlight hot, rushing the blood. Boughs snapping above and around me, as if the cage of my life had been welded together from millions of breaking ribs.

Though my brain surgeryin which a vascular malformation was removed from my brain stemwas seven years ago, still my entire body hurts. My health is detonating. Each day my disabilities seem to worsen.

The cat head-butts my blistered hand, prodding and ramming until I cup her tiny skull. She purrs and pivots in my palm, and kneads her claws against my belly. It is hours past her feeding time. On the coffee table in front of us, atop a pile of tattered magazines, my cell phone jumps. My entire body jolts in surprise. Catface leaps off me and sprints out of the room. I listen to her scamper down the basement steps, scrabble up a mound of unpacked boxes, and then claw and slink into the paneled ceiling, and I am reminded of my aloneness. Lonely in the silent house and a stranger to myself.