(up to now separately) by KC Trommer

“(up to now separately)” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the 2022 Amelia Gray 2K Contest. These pieces expertly highlight the wonderfully diverse potential of flash prose.

In her prose poem, “(up to now separately),” KC Trommer plunges the reader into the incessant internal monologue of the domestic. Here, quotidian tasks impose a tyranny upon the drive to create. Yet the narrative voice breaks free from the confines of a marriage to “someone who loves fighting, who’s never wrong” into a space where the creative and the domestic/maternal coexist, inseparable, bound. Trommer’s use of rhythm and pacing, her juxtaposition of the pressures of art and motherhood, place this poem within the lineage of artists, who, like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, have opened space for those whose lives in generations past might have been swallowed by the incessant demands of “socks and shoes socks and shoes socks and shoes.” —CRAFT

“Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.”

—Mierle Laderman Ukeles, MANIFESTO! MAINTENANCE ART 1969!

Proposal for an Exhibition, “CARE” (1969)

MONDAY

socks and shoes socks and shoes socks and shoes

Taking all the fucking time, I clean and organize. I laundry. I plan the menu for the week, remind myself this work now will mean less work later. The work stays.

Now we have the house to ourselves.

TUESDAY

socks and shoes socks and shoes socks and shoes we cannot miss this bus!

There are so many imperatives in the mornings.

Photograph of Mierle on the museum steps, a bucket loaded up with soapy water, and her scrubbing, cleaner of 70’s shoe shit, holding the pose and doing the work, making her point with labor, putting her body in the line of sight.

When the bus comes, I stand with the others and wave.

WEDNESDAY

socks and shoes—why is this so hard?—we’re going to miss the bus!

What’s wrong of course is what’s always wrong: women alone cleaning up the evidence of the day, pointing the furniture and the meals in the direction of the next day. No one else will do it and it will go undone if she doesn’t do it and because she does it all the time, she gets ideas of how to do it well, do it right, and then she can’t not do it because at some point there is a way it should be done. She set her own standard and so she goes on doing it.

I sweep my boy’s hair over his forehead to better see him, trying to teach him this matters, to see what needs doing, and to let him know that he can also do it. I am not the only one. We both need to learn this. Here are the things I have learned; let me teach you:

Make your bed in the mornings. Open the curtains. Think of yourself, later today, coming home, what kind of room do you want to walk into. Feed yourself breakfast, make yourself lunch. Don’t forget your keys.

When the bus comes, I stand with the others and wave.

THURSDAY

socks and shoes socks and shoes socks and shoes!—it would be a song if it came out as anything other than a demand, if my nerves weren’t underneath it, if the cost of a car to and from his school if we miss the bus weren’t underneath it, if the fact that he drags and I screech and I hold all the consequences weren’t underneath it, if there were safety underneath it.

What’s wrong of course is what’s always wrong: I have to think of it all, and plan ahead, expect resistance. From my boy, I can manage it. From every other quarter, where there should be help—is should a useful word?—there is only difficulty. I expect resistance for the sake of resistance; I plan for it. I plan for alternative routes, ways of phrasing. I plan on it and it takes all my time. I plan on asking for the opposite of what we need. All we need right now is to get to the bus stop.

When the bus comes, I stand with the others and wave.

FRIDAY

I want him safe. I also want the time away to tend to myself. I want him safe but do I want the fight that would get him there, which means work? I want him safe; I also want to be safe. I should not have to choose between them; they should be one and the same. Should isn’t the right word. Are is the right word. I want him safe. For this, do I sacrifice my safety? Will he be safe when I start a war with someone who loves fighting, who’s never wrong? Is my son safe if I don’t start it? I put everything in place. I plan. I think ahead. I remember everything I forgot. I try to. I want him safe and I don’t know how to get him there, if I am enough, if I can do it. I’m so tired of doing it all, all the time.

Anyhow, socks and shoes—your mask!—do you have your keys?

We make it. I stand with the others and wave.

SATURDAY

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am no one’s wife now. (Thank god.) I am a mother. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. I write. I try to write. I tell myself to write. It is work. I write. I try to write. I tell myself to write. It is work that saves me. I write. I try to write. I tell myself to write. It is a conversation with myself that I have to have. I have to pay attention to it, or else.

SUNDAY

It’s almost Monday, when he goes to his other house to live his other life—every other week now, we shift. Every other week now, I am alone. Tomorrow, I get a break but there is no rest. I get a break and there are things that are broken that I cannot fix.

I clean. I laundry. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Repeat. Different words, same actions, every other week.

KC TROMMER is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She lives in Jackson Heights with her son. Find her on Instagram @_wctb_.

Featured image by Steve Harvey, courtesy of Unsplash.

By KC Trommer | AG2KC, Flash CNF, CNF | April 5, 2023

Tagged: Motherhood, Prose Poem, Art, Intertextuality

Author’s Note

In 2016, I learned about the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles after a party conversation with the artist Nina Katchadourian, who encouraged me to see the retrospective of Ukeles’s work that had recently opened at the Queens Museum. I brought my son, who was six at the time, with me to the museum and he was enraptured by “Snow Workers’ Ballet: 2012,” a video work showcasing the coordinated movements of Japanese snow plows, one named Romeo and one Juliet, that Ukeles had orchestrated and recorded.

While my son sat on a stool and watched the snowplows find and fall for each other, I was drawn to Ukeles’s MANIFESTO MAINTENANCE ART 1969!, a typewritten work that proposes that Ukeles join the NYC Sanitation Department as their artist in residence in order to create a longitudinal artistic study of the work of NYCDS employees.

In the MANIFESTO, Ukeles articulates what work meant for her as an artist and as a mother. I was taken with the moment on the third page in which she accounts for and attempts to integrate her identities:

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art.

The parentheticals here do a lot of heavy lifting. As a single parent with a demanding full-time job and as a writer, I found this articulation to be a radical act, even at a remove of almost fifty years. In what order should I place my identities? Can we bring together our identities so they cohere? How much of our lives are made up of small acts of maintenance and care? How much of the structures of our lives are outside of our control but nonetheless control how we live?

My poetry manuscript in progress, Paragones, looks at work by female-identifying artists. For each poem, I have tried to find a form that mirrors the work being explored. To craft this prose poem, I wanted to pay attention to some of the same concerns that Ukeles explores in her art—care, time, and labor—and so created a piece that used a week-long time frame in which the speaker kept returning to the same moment in the day.

Since my piece was inspired by Ukeles, I wanted to reference her and what I understand to be the thinking behind her work. I took my title from the MANIFESTO with the aim of exploring the long game that is motherhood, documenting some of the constant acts of care and maintenance that have gone into supporting my son as he grows. I also wanted to explore the tedious difficulty of building and maintaining habits and routines that allow our lives to function, along with the particular emotional challenges I have faced as the co-parent of a child who shares two homes.

My hope is that the piece makes visible some of the invisible work of motherhood, and that the cumulative effect of looking at this physical and emotional work over time resonates with those who have lived through similar experiences.

(up to now separately) by KC Trommer

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Mother-Writers Are Writers

Empty Nester by Jennifer Lewis

Author’s Note