Nicole Callihan on Joanna Fuhrmans The Year of Yellow Butterflies

J

Ive been thinking about those days when we used to run into each other at the gym. I had handed off my bunny-graham-clutching-baby to the fairly neglectful staff of the childcare room and was trying to stay awake as I read crappy novels on the elliptical, and you were, as I saw it, sashaying into 9:30 Yoga Booty Ballet. Sometimes you wore black, and I wore spandex, and sometimes I wore cotton, and you wore grey, but always we were in these bodies that we had stuffed into our various workout gear, and we had ponytails on our heads, and probably we were without jewelry or make-up, and most likely our armpits werent shaved, and so in some way, it seems we were exposed, somehow raw, a less adorned, less manicured, less curated version than, say, what our Facebook friends saw. But I want you to know that I never, not even for a second, felt like I knew you.

Dear little cage, dark plum, I now have so much to confess.

It was the year that I was going to try to make a metaphor of your writing in which I used only your metaphors to speak of your writing but then I found your letter in the pocket of a borrowed goat. Maybe you had left it at the party, the one where the host was giving away reluctant animals and everyone stared at the city until it was the end of God. I think I was at home nursing the baby, but I heard it was magic, or maybe I read it was magic, or maybe someone instagrammed what seemed to be magic. Anyway, the next day I offered the goat a home. I would use its milk for weaning.

Which is to say: weeks later (though years had passed), that night when I offered you the pear, I also started stealing from you. Please dont defriend me. First it was the hoarding of the letter and then the herding of the goat. I dont know. Maybe it wasnt stealing exactly. Its like I borrowed your lipstick (the one in the perfect ripe shade of self-pity) and forgot to give it back. Come fall, I like to reach into my pocket and finger it guiltily. Its fall now, dark plum.

Listen: If you are my friend listen to the leaves turning color and save the sound for me Open your mouth and let me speak in your voice or in your voices No one wants to listen to me babbling on like a walrus. Listen: In my third favorite Lindsay Lohan movie, the boy who plays her younger brother stuffs two chopsticks in his nose and pretends to be a walrus. Do you know what I mean?

I guess what Im trying to say is we probably should have gotten tea. At the very least, we could have pointed to the clouds and made pictures. There was another year. Remember? It was not the year the city was an obese rabbit, nor the year of muzzles and blossoms, nor of Mona Lisa and rain. It was not so long after the turn of the century. It was the year the city was made of glass cornflakes. We thought it would break. We thought the crunching would drive us deaf or mad. We must have lived a handful of blocks from each other. We must have run into each other on the street or at the gym. We must have shrugged our shoulders under the terrible sky. We must have mentioned trying to get tea. But I remember well the year you were getting married. Bob? Is that his name? I only know it from the poems. I remember panting from the elliptical and gushing on and on about Martha Stewart wedding magazines. Youve gotta get them, I must have said too loud. Joanna, I am a total sucker for that crap: lavender sprigs in jelly jars, hand-painted signs with backwards Rs, the whole lot, and maybe because Im such a sucker what Im getting ready to say is going to embarrass you, but when I woke up in The Year of Yellow Butterflies I experienced this sort of poetic synesthesia where I became you and you became her and she became me, and it felt so good and so right, and I kind of wanted to sing, and maybe I did a little. So thank you. Also, I want to say I am so sorry about your friend dying. I wanted to crawl inside of that poem and sit on the couch of it listening to the party music, and I wanted to lean over and hug you. I had been so taken by her, your friend, her struggles with drinking, her rum punch in a martini glass, her rented home and wild animals, and then she was dead. I guess thats what happens to these bodies. After I finished your book, I went back to look for the metaphor of the yellow butterflies. I was sure I had missed it, something about them yellowing, about their early deaths or genetic similarities to walruses or ability to love without judgment, but there was nothing. I like to imagine that they flew around you as you Yoga-Booty-Balleted, Joanna, all the yellow and yelling, a nest of beauty and wings. I hope that you are well. The neighborhood is different without you. Or maybe I should say, now that Ive found you in these poems, the neighborhood would be different if you were still here. Me, I tend to my goat and my children. We wander the streets in our bodiesgoat-body, girl bodies, middle-aged bodyand sup on plums. The cartoon bubble leaving my mouth is empty, except for a wandering comma shaped like a tear. Do you know what I mean? Of course you do. N.