I am having coffee with Barney Rosset

by Allison Leigh Peters

August 13, 2011

and his wife who left him, Joan Mitchell, who I’ve admired

now for two years, ever since I first stood in front

of her White Territory. I get lost in its sad, which I like

to do — get lost — with the things I love: all that green and white
and black. Then five seasons later it is spring and I am having coffee

with a boy, and I am stoned, and I’m sure he is, too.

Later we go to his apartment, where I admire the noose

in the hallway, where I say I was a hanged black man

in another life, and he believes me. We smoke

and smoke and smoke, and my tongue tastes like Earth.

There is a book sitting on this boy’s coffee

table, and because I am trying to be both delicate

as a girl and rough as a critic, I pick it up and start reading.

We are all alone here and we are dead, I read.

The weather will continue bad, I continue reading.

Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.

Suddenly I am a black iron ghost; I am not a girl or a critic

or anything any longer. This boy says every line is poetry in there,

and he lets me borrow the book when I say my eyes are

finally welling up with the smoke of time. I kiss him

a few times that spring, one time for a long time. I’ve read

ten pages when I leave him and his book for Iowa,

where I’m writing now. I wouldn’t be writing now, not this,

if I didn’t just realize how experience is an intricate dream.

This morning I dreamt real things, real conversations with real people,

artists who are here with me in Iowa, and I believe my dreams

might be real. But the dream has nothing to do with it, really.

I bought the book myself, the same book the boy let me borrow

those weeks we were kissing, and I’ve read enough

to have my life changed, whatever that means, but it’s true.

In Iowa the artists and I are on a farm, and there is a grove by the barn

in which I write, and as of three weeks ago I am also a painter.

It is because I have paint that I have been painting, and when I paint,

I think of Joan and the grove where I wander at sunrise.

I climb everything like a child and take pictures of the sky

with my phone. And it’s a shame I have to write words like phone

in this pathetic way — not like, I phone my father after dinner, but like,

I take pictures with my phone. I know the Internet is coming, here:

Today the Internet is working, thank god, which means I am free

to write or not write, so I sign into my brother’s Netflix

account, which he only just let me use because now we are

finally friends, and I search for Tropic of Cancer, which is all

I want, but it doesn’t stream. Below is Obscene. I play it.

This is where I am trying to talk about consequence and reality and fate

maybe. A life is flashing before me, but it’s not Barney Rosset’s,

even though that’s whose life I’m supposed to believe it is.

It’s not Joan Mitchell’s, the brilliant painter who means so much

to me, in part because she’s beautiful, and White Territory, too,

and in part because it’s the name of my dead grandmother

and the name of the saint I picked — when my mother picked me to be

Catholic — when I was 15 or 16 because I knew the most about Joan
of Arc and because of my grandmother who was dead

even then, and suddenly it’s all coming together: Joan Mitchell,

who I find out went and married this boy, Barney Rosset,

who published this book I am reading that is changing everything, and

who has the mag for which I cannot solely be writing this,

because this is for Barney Rosset, and I need to go to the source,

and he is the source, and in this moment I am the light, 22

years or 89 years (and I was born in ‘89 and you in ‘22

— I’m 22, you’re 89 — DON’T THEY SEE?) or two thousand eleven

art-ancient years in the making: Barney Rosset, I am having coffee with you

right here, and your Joan, who is also my Joan, is with us.

for Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

Allison Leigh Peters writes poems, makes art, thinks, drinks coffee and was born in Bakersfield in 1989. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, MUZZLE, Michigan Quarterly Review, Red Lightbulbs, Burner Magazine, Dunes Review and elsewhere. An Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, Leigh graduated with honors from the University of Michigan in 2011. Founder of Elemeno Press, Leigh edits and publishes Orange Quarterly. She lives in an apartment in downtown Traverse City, where she works for the public schools and volunteers for the public library and the National Writers Series.