Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: From the very first line of “The News,” we’re plunged into an absurdist reality that we slowly come to realize is just reality as we know it. Blauner does a masterful job of depicting the way personal loss is overwhelmed by the big national and international losses we’re exposed to every day. In the face of mass casualties, the end of public institutions, and the rollercoaster trajectory of the global economy, what’s the loss of one friend?
Listen to Blauner read “The News”:
The News
My boyfriend used a hot melt glue gun for bonding everything to everything else, for repairs, and just in case of an earthquake here in Seattle. He used it constantly. When he left, I bought my own glue gun, but at first I didn’t use it at all.
I don’t understand what happened to us, I tell our friends. Now sometimes my arms and my legs don’t feel like my own. But who else’s could they be? I suppose I could borrow someone’s, finding a purpose for the glue gun to attach those appendages. My friends and I could exchange, lending them to each other.
On the radio, television, and internet I hear how a man describes the world and what he wants to do with it, juxtaposing accidents with his enemies, bombs and the smell in my hair, money and all those rich men. On the news there are constant emergencies. If I drive a car, will I crash it? Will I marry someday? But there’s no one to ask. The world is so large and in need of mending.
I start to bind myself to each new day, even if it could be dangerous or shift out of place. I miss my boyfriend, whom I occasionally glimpse loitering in spots he’s never visited before, an animal shelter, a church, a race track, a bookstore. How can we ever put the pieces between us back together when he just isn’t himself?
I’m adjusting the same way I think marriage works. I stuff our secrets onto little pieces of paper that I try to arrange coherently on a corkboard. I’m using thumbtacks to make sense of them: the location where it occurred, the secret, what was said or done. Then what to do about it. But they are beyond my comprehension. “Home, a dark mass inside me, crying, see a doctor,” or “Kitchen, hates oranges, screaming, try a new recipe.” But I don’t need them anymore. How are they connected to what’s happening now? Current events like wars and plane crashes and children being shot at schools? What does it matter? Maybe I should glue my own companion cat together, made from newspapers.
I blame the politicians for saying they can fix these things when they can’t. They use their important voices to say things like, Now everything will be better or It’s nice to be me. Whereas my circumstances are just the opposite. I am living while attaching one day to another until they become weeks, months, and years. I finally run into my old boyfriend at the boat builders’. He’s using epoxy now. He left you for a boat? all my friends ask. There’s a difference between gossip and news, as well as between glue and epoxy. I go home. I unplug everything but I really just want to throw it all away.
Laurie Blauner is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a book of hybrid nonfiction. Another nonfiction book, Swerve, is newly released from Rain Mountain Press. Her latest poetry book, Come Closer, won the Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press (2023). Her web site is laurieblauner.com.
