In Their Own Words
Asa Drake on “If I allow you to look into my blameless disaster, whom do you look away from?”
If I allow you to look into my blameless disaster, whom do you look away from?
Distinguish ordinary uncertainty from concerning uncertainty.
These feelings are interchangeable,
but what about meaningful uncertainty? Passive: My skin breaks
out at the beginning of every season.
Passive: I read my insurance policy and feel some sense of safety is possible.
Between storm surge videos, my father-in-law
sleeps with fluorescent life vests, which like persimmons are in season.
Unlike persimmons, their bright vermilion floats.
I test this. A persimmon sinks in my water glass. I talk to a friend
late into the night, before the internet cuts off.
No one can tell me why my father-in-law stayed until the bridges closed
and his couch floated out to sea.
The past tense would make us look foolish. Faith attenuated like silk.
Do I need to tell you how strong this fabric is, or
how it was rendered from sleeping bodies? It’s difficult to name anyone
in this kind of production scheme,
but rendering generally refers to sustained heat and the extraction
of organic elements. So much change happens
while I'm asleep. I’m almost forty, I tell friends who are forty
so that they can open for me a five-year window
of productivity. Under the calyx of a persimmon I find unwanted surprises.
From Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) reprinted with the permisison of the author.
On “If I allow you to look into my blameless disaster, whom do you look away from?”
In 2024, hurricane season, the persimmon harvest, and election season overlapped. They frequently do. The second week of September is peak hurricane season though hurricanes in recent years have formed even as late as November. Mid-September is also peak persimmon season for Jonesville Persimmons. Their Saijo variety (and even some of their fuyu) take on the bright, nearly fluorescent red-orange color that I find more frequently in fabrics named “persimmon” than the fruit itself.
During Hurricane Helene, I remember counting persimmons on the counter while rationing the battery life of my phone. How much could I spend talking to a friend? I guiltily decided which friends I would respond to and which I would defer until the phone could be charged again. Intermittently, in the week after the hurricane, whenever I had access to public wifi (internet was the last utility restored in my neighborhood), I’d receive videos from my in-laws chronicling the storm surge. In one video, my father in-law gathers towels to save the house from flooding. In another, the water inside the house reaches the windows. Alongside my notes from these videos, I had written and circled the following line from Danez Smith’s Bluff: “the final choice of the human: repair or epilogue.”
I was paying attention to the ways we process different degrees of uncertainty and proximity to disaster. Even considering the immediate damage of Hurricane Helene—my inlaws had to gut and rebuild their house of 30 years—I was amazed at how much the news coverage of Florida’s urban coast surpassed coverage of other disasters—ones where I felt public outcry might make a greater difference; where rebuilding would not be considered a matter of course. In my notebook, I wrote down a headline that described how the barrier islands at Madirea Beach “look[ed] like a warzone,” and yet the same new site minimized coverage of actual warzones. What does it mean to liken a hurricane to intentional devastation during a genocide?
In my first draft, I didn’t include the detail about my inlaws’ house. I feared that one disaster might eclipse another. But that isn’t the case. Disasters exist in relation to one another. How we engage with them is political, related to the body politic, which is of course tied to the body.
For the longest time I tried to make a neat bridge between the incredibly delicate silk threads of insects that love the persimmon orchard and the bright rip-stop life vest fabric. The sense of color and warning mattered to me. There’s no historical fact to link silk to life vests (which have been made of cork, polyester, nylons) but I kept thinking about how the process for making a synthetic fabric and for making silk both reminded me of the hurricane and our country—the sustained heat and the human desire to extract value—this was the shared origin that mattered most to me.
