Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
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KATHLEEN HEIL


Coming Attraction

                      Possibilities have always been preferred over endings
it is a question of entry into feeling contained before
it becomes silent
 
                        You called three times and it was over
it was ended we played our versions of our movie
in our heads for it was over it was
 
                        Then that I called you and my voice was sent to yours
from across great distances a transmission you listened you spoke
into a device that was closer to you than I was this is sometimes
a metaphor and this time it was
 
                        Shitty I feel shitty you say and I do too
is also sometimes how you feel after seeing certain movies
you want that part of your life back although you can't have it
back you had gone to see it because you had liked the preview
but not the movie it was awful this is sometimes
not a metaphor for anything it was
 
                        Then that you told me when I received your voice
in the receiver that you'd had a movie in your mind that morning
about a time when your mother was doing the dishes and
you were small you wanted to tell her something and
you were going to let your voice be received but
then you noticed her leaning over the kitchen sink crying
lost in the reverberation of her own private movie and
then you knew something that you hadn't before

                         And that was
 
              



less like an object and more like the weather

Let's leave the pliés and spinal curves and attitudes out of it,
unless they serve to keep our bodies warm. Cunningham said dance
“gives you nothing back…no paintings…no poems…nothing
but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
 
I could feel the weight of my bones gather what was left
of the waxed floor and find in the fascia a quiet joyous potential,
alive to the impish capacity of our joints to do what we don’t expect
to our gratitude. Surprise yourself if you can at least once a week,
 
find a way to get from a to b without using your fore or hind limbs, or
from b to a using only your memories. Merce was waiting for me there
on the platform, the local had switched to express and told no one,
 
so I told him about the time I saw five dancers push at the limit
of what moving meant: one dancer giving up a backward curve
so generous her lambent head nearly emptied of logic.




​
512 hours
                Marina Abramović, London

The Serpentine walk we were led down led us to expect redemption
in the form of art. We got there and I lay down, defeated; you walked around.
 
People were enacting their ideas about being watched; they wanted to be;
you were weary because they kept telling you what to do—a flaw
 
in the texture of the artwork, a flaw in the texture of life itself​—​m
while I wanted to lie there all afternoon. When was the last time
 
you were in a room, sleeping, and there was light left in the day, and
twenty-some-odd people? Heads down, there was nothing left to perform
 
except the good will in that drawn space, which we attuned
through the white of our noise-canceling headphones​—​m



​
Copyright © April 2020 Kathleen Heil

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Kathleen Heil is a writer, choreographer, and translator. Her poems, stories, essays, and translations appear in The New Yorker, FENCE, Colorado Review, Two Lines, MAKE, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and many other journals. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others, she lives and works in Berlin. More at kathleenheil.net and on Instagram @kathleen_heil.

​

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art