6 Things I’d Like to Say to Ivy

by Anne Kierkegaard

1.     You seem to be everywhere I look, Ivy. The closer to the edge of Berlin I come, the more of you there is, Ivy. On the cherry tree in the deep east of Brandenburg, in the small garden with the old barn that we bought. Growing on endless Soviet and World War I memorials—and on the churchyards of course. And all over the old mill that I passed in the wolf woods; a massive structure of ivy stretching up and out of the valley, blooming in December, only the mill’s steadily rotating wheel visible. 

2.     The above made me wish I were more like you, Ivy. Because you’re not like the prickly, stout juniper shrubbery smelling of spicy fox piss that surrounds the Seelower memorial honoring the “liberation” of Germany by the Soviet army. And you’re not like the pretty grapevine that has surrendered to the autumn too soon, too apathetic, painting a red trail along Berlin train tracks all the way to Wannsee and back. 

3.     You’re more like getting off that train, Ivy, and following google maps—climbing up, down, left, right—to find an audio guide to the acoustic memorial of Heinrich von Kleist and instead finding myself in a camp of homeless people under the bridge between Großer and Kleiner Wannsee. Green sleeping bags tugged in between the top of the grey pillars and the road’s flipside, like truthful garlands. 

4.     And at the actual memorial—a tombstone surely installed by Herr von Kleist’s ghost himself, mostly grieving for the living—you’re a crisp, leafy poison in the air above the Havel river. And the river, the colour of baby Yoda’s eyes, laps against the banks heavy with cold while an elderly behatted lady trims your growth around the stone, and a strange streamable voice in my ears only shouts:

… Wo geh ich her? Wo geh ich hin?
Und wenn du das nicht weißt, wohlan:
Wo bin ich? sag mir an, das wirst du wissen;
In welcher Gegend hier befind ich mich?“

Where am I going here? Where am I going to?

And if you don’t know, then:

Where am I? Tell me now, that you must know:

What is this place where I find myself?

And the Alraun, the witch—or is it you, Ivy? —answers:

Zwei Schritt vom Grab, Quintilius Varus,
Hart zwischen Nichts und Nichts! Gehab dich wohl!

Two steps from the grave, Quintilius Varus  

Right between nothing and nothing! Fare thee well!

At least I’m between, I thought, but to be certain I took my family and left the nothingness of quarantine city, while we could, to feel closer to living things growing out of the dirt. 

5.     And oh Ivy, the sky-scraping cherry tree is covered in you in the garden that we bought. A sight for sore city eyes, wild enough to fall in love with. But now that I am the caretaker of the tree, I am unsure that it will survive you. Is it true or is it just a myth: that you kill? I do want to do the right thing, but I’m in a Funkloch and have not yet installed Wi-Fi, so there’s no way of knowing; I tear you off the tree. Hack and hack your roots. With a spade, it’s fun while listening to Taylor Swift, setting free the blond scars of the tree’s skin. It’s a way to deal with love, if I understood the song correctly: a kind of ivy?

6.     I hacked on, not successful in killing your roots, while the kids pulled down the grapevine from the old stone walls in one morning: The morning of the freedom of the stones, I thought. But the stones looked old and like something was missing. The vine was easy to get rid of, but Ivy, you were like: Thick jelly, poison stalactites from a hairy misplaced root, like the legs of a mythologized spider, hanging from a tree. But protruding from the ground, little green leaves nourished by the hidden mother of roots. Not like the start of nothing. More like a trinity of growth, death, love: destruction at its best. Like you, Ivy. It made me want to be more like you.

all artwork made by Anne Kierkegaard

Anne Kierkegaard writes in Danish and English, and her work has been published in the Ekbátana anthology Spillekort med Digte, BluehouseJournal, Slagtryk, and Reflex Fiction. She lives in Berlin with her partner and children. She has an M.Litt. in Creative in Writing from University of Glasgow. Her idea of fun is to translate poetry and arrange data in excel.

 The Con of Being Together

by Joey Levenson 

By the time I’d left Berlin, the roses had turned to black. I’d been watching them day in and day out, each morning and evening at the flat wooden table by the kitchen window. They stood throughout the entire trip clasped behind the plastic wrap I’d gifted them in, stuck in a wide-rimmed glass of water which only I cared enough to change. He told me he liked them that way, with the red ribbon on the plastic and the roses stuck behind them as if frozen in magic. I hadn’t the energy to tell him that the red of the roses would only match the red of the ribbon if the plastic was cut, and the water was changed every day. Instead, I remarked on how the plastic recalled a famous Moschino dress and I let them die, slowly and somewhat sadistically. It was ironic, then, that our greatest fight would unravel right there in front of the roses at the kitchen table.

You see, I knew trouble was brewing from the moment I arrived and he took me in the crane of his neck and began to mouth bad words about another friend of his, the one who was staying in the next room over. 

“She’s annoying me so much,” he mumbled, letting the words tickle against my neck. “Complaining all the time, talking about her boyfriend, her lost gloves, whatever it is next.”

“Don’t worry, we’re gonna have fun.” I said, earnestly. 

“I’m so glad you’re here.” He replied.

I knew trouble was brewing when he took the roses out of my hands with gratitude, then left on the arm of the sofa like a damp towel. I hated that they looked so pretty there, right where he left them.  

“The plastic on them is just so pretty,” he gushed. “I love plastic. I’m obsessed.”

Why did the flowers bother me so? I don’t know — something about metaphors, I guess.

And most importantly, I knew trouble was brewing because my last trip to visit him – my best friend – had ended in ruins. We’d arranged drinks together at a cool gay socialist bar down the street to both commiserate my deperature and celebrate seeing each other after so long. But, as we left his apartment for the bar he hastily left me on the street to meet the boy he’d been hooking up with the week prior. I was angry for weeks after.

This time around, days drew by like chalk on a blackboard. I was guarded, because of what happened last time, but I was still open enough to be happy and warm around him. 

 The problem began when I learned I was to see him in intervals, because he was busy with another boy he’d met somewhat three days prior to my arrival. But, I found the days of abandonment by him to be somewhat of a hidden blessing as it left me with hours of introspection afforded only to an individual who is bound to a boring solitude. I say solitude in the most literal sense, as I was in a foreign country – with no grasp of the language – that was undergoing extensive pandemic lockdown restrictions. Thankfully, the solitude left me without the anxiety to get out and meet new people, so I instead journaled and looked back on the state of our friendship. It had been mired, always, with conflict; conflict which was big, small, silly, and serious, conflict from the time he told me the concept of white privilege was dumb because it discounted the individual hardships he experienced as a white person, conflict about the constant unsolicited critiques he’d give me about myself and my appearance and any man I chose to date, conflict about whether or not Pol Pot was a Marxist (he wasn’t), and conflict about French cheese and wine, etc. 

“I call you hot all the time,” he’d said that one time. “You’re making this deep. Why are you so mad?”

“Because I can’t stand you.”

Was that how friends spoke to each other? I can’t say there is an easily applicable innocent/guilty binary between us, as much good often ran through our friendship too. But, there was a rather evident pattern of me reacting to his every action, which informed me of how I could make this stop: stop reacting, and he would stop acting. 

I remember trying to write him a letter before it all came out of my mouth on the eve of my departure. I sat down and wrote in the letter that I thanked him for his friendship and hospitality (the limited amount of which I could gather), and made a passive aggressive note on his lack of presence around me during the trip. It began to feel like a break-up letter, so I scratched in reductive remarks such as “I appreciate you, and I know I don’t show it much so I’m sorry” and “I know I can be cold sometimes, but the warmth between friends often goes unspoken.” Yet, by the time I was comparing our fortune to a broken chandelier, I knew I had to scrap the whole thing. If anything, it felt all too familiar to our past. I accepted that, as friends, we were stuck in a cycle of passion by way of disarticulation. Toeing the line had become an act of erasing it altogether and drawing zig-zags in its place. In trying to re-establish the line, I put great thought into whether or not confronting him about the matter of confrontation was really just as much of an endless feedback loop as it so sounded on paper. I need to stop reacting, I told myself. But then one lonely morning at this place, I ate two eggs and some bread and listed in my head the words that came to mind when I thought of him: provocation, criticism, neglect, carelessness, and narcissism. 

“Ugly,” I then said aloud to nobody but the window. 

I didn’t necessarily mean he was ugly, but rather the situation. The words circled my head like cries of birds, and I knew then that I could no longer sit and wade in the thickness of unknowing or second-guessing every action (or lack thereof) of his. Instead, I had to invite curiosity into what had exactly decomposed between two best friends. I wanted to understand the intention of conflict within love.

The word “conflict” itself comes from the Latin verb confligere, which rather simply means “struck together.”  The act of striking together is as passionate as it may be violent, and I felt our own conflict was his inarticulate way of striking us together. The extent to which I would stick around and be there for him was measured by the extent to which I was willing to accept his most brazen, unfiltered, and intense self – and vice-versa. He knew that I could not unravel into the opaque of his periphery if I were constantly in the centre, shining like a Dog Star and burning just as hot. I realised, then, that he was scared to lose my grip, not his. Every time I argued with him, or resented him, it solidified us as an inseparable being. 

Second, I understood passion as the coin with two heads: conflict and kissing, and if we could not kiss, then we could still be passionate together by means of conflict. Passion, however, was always wrong. I knew that from being a Brit who wanted to move to Germany.

I swayed back and forth over what to do. It was tempting to forgo both the letter and a confrontation all together, and leave a rather empty and disappointing trip without so much as a clue to my hurt. However, near the expected-end of my trip, British Airways had decided to cancel my flight home to London for a total of three times. I was met by my host with an aloof and dissatisfied attitude towards hosting me, as if a further three days were encroaching on his precious time. “Have you texted your other friend at all?” He’d ask every time my flight was cancelled once more, nonchalantly raising it as if to appear unrelated to the issue of my stay extending for days on end. I felt he wanted me gone so his new lover could finally stay the night at his place, where I was occupying the bed. I couldn’t tell if the pang in my stomach was from jealousy or rage, or both. I’d already explained to him my one other friend in Berlin (who rescued me at the queer socialist bar the last time I was in Berlin, no less) had been busy the week I was there, and his repeated insistence on me to contact her was the final knife. 

“I just think it’s so weird that she’s avoiding you,” he would say, as if taunting me with a coal poker. 

Friendship was not meant to sustain hurt, it was meant to fix it.

Those remarks, of which mostly came in the morning upon his return from somewhere else, forced my hand. I felt inclined to sit him down at the kitchen table on the eve of my (finally confirmed) departure, and wax my words with rage. So I did, so they came. I laid in to him thick and fast, and I surprised myself with how well I was articulating the heat of feeling with the cool sleight of analysis. We sat there, right in front of the roses, as our backs ached from craning on the old seats with improper spines. I did not relent, nor did I finish the food we’d cooked together in harmony only hours before. Something within me was desperate for him to know the depth of the edge he’d pushed me over, and I could not find the will to stop. I explained countless examples of his behaviour which insulted me, hurt me, cut me out, and embarrassed me. Admittedly, my ego at that point was large enough to feel grossly damaged by the horror of being embarrassed. 

Through exasperated breath, I said things such as “you lied and said you were coming home, and then didn’t,” and “you tell me to meet you for breakfast at 11am, and when I arrive you haven’t even left your boy’s bed,” and “why do you continue to make me feel so unimportant in your life?” Yes, in hindsight, they could be considered somewhat jovial. But between friends, I felt a series of trivial occurrences always mounted into something bigger, and they mattered. You see, there is no pull of romance (such as with partners) nor blood (such as with family) that keeps friends together. There is only trust, of which he had broken. Of course, he apologised profusely. In fact, he apologised in three languages. But, I was sick of the gesture. I’d wanted action, which he wasn’t understanding. The real shock to his system came when I ultimately broke down and blamed myself for everything, which, at the time, was true. I blamed myself for putting myself in a situation that I ultimately knew was going to end up like this. 

“Don’t say that. That’s horrible, and that’s cold.” It sounded like a beg between the grit of his teeth. 

There was a moment, and then he spoke again. 

“Do you trust me any more?” 

“No.” 

It was the first time I’d seen him close to tears. I wasn’t proud. 

I realised later, between hours of raised voices and tempered finger pointing, that this was the most honest and emotional two friends had been together for a while. 

Latin dictates ‘together’ as the prefix con-, because that’s all it ever was: a con. 

The next morning at rosy-fingered dawn, I packed my bags and prepared to walk out the door for my flight. Suddenly, he sat up in the darkness and looked at me. I set my bags down and perched on the bed beside his shadowy figure and hugged him. He held me and traced the line of my shoulders with his fingers. As I began to frown, he kissed my cheek and laid back down to sleep.

I left without a word.

Joey Levenson (he/she/they) is a non-binary writer from London, whose writing specialises in topics relating to queerness, communism, and Sailor Moon. They have written in the past for Hero Magazine, Candy Transversal, Dazed, and more, and are currently working on a television drama pilot with Curtis Brown Creative.

Jerry Garcia

by Sean Turner McLeod

You’re starting to miss the intrusions.

You last saw him skittering out from the fridge, trailing the previous tenant’s cellophane. 

With the way you screamed, dropped that mug, nearly hoovered him up—little hind kicks like Winnie the Pooh drowning before you yanked the plug—he won’t have guessed you were glad to see him.

He refracted through a hole in the prefab, defab kitchen unit you only saw when you shook it and returned to his recesses in the marrow of the building. 

You’d say (for ease) to his home but you are not sure what a home signifies to a mouse—in this sandstone lattice of connected dwellings, he transcends spheres without acknowledgement; this flat/office/breathless ultimatum of yours is, you’d say, just another excursion to him, but you are not sure what an excursion signifies to a mouse.

Does the knowledge of one presuppose the other?

Mice, like most creatures with the intelligence and mobility to self-preserve, will interrogate their confinement—according to Rebecca West of petslady.com, rodents are “the ultimate Houdinis when it comes to escaping.”

Although the last part seems unnecessary—you wouldn’t have assumed they were the ultimate Houdinis of getting killed by a drunken kidney punch—the desire for escape is incumbent on an understanding of imprisonment, isn’t it?

The first time you saw him, you weren’t sure you had—a brief abrasion on the corner of your sight, already clipping through the skirting when you turned around—wiggling a panicked salute through the crack.

This was, to be fair, more of an introduction than you have received from certain housemates in the past.

This place is not yours, he said.

Where does a mouse fit in the already distended hierarchy of the rental ecosystem?

Are you above him because you are paying to be here (and he is a mouse), or is he above you, because you are paying to be here (and he does not know he is a mouse)?

Does the ambiguity make you equals?

As authorities in your home go, you’d think you’d be somewhere near the top, but with your agency, your landlord, the Lord Provost, taking up so much space, who’s to say you’re even on the list?

//

You felt guilty the first time you set out your Big Cheese Live Catch Mouse Traps, baiting the little red triggers with Nutella and Crunchy Nut Clusters, although not as guilty as you did about the dormant kill trap on top of the fridge—bought as a grim but likely contingency.

You didn’t have much of a right to capture him and weren’t sure what would happen if you did.

There’s a little park down the street—maybe if you let him out there, it would be too far for him to find his way home. But this seemed cruel—he may have family in the building, it’s freezing out, and if the shaggy shrieks you hear at night are real, there are foxes around.

Besides, there’s a pandemic on—put him on the street and you’re crossing the picket line.

You considered maybe keeping him, buying a hamster cage and showing him to eventual guests, but that seemed worse—maybe the park’s dangerous but at least you wouldn’t be depriving him of whatever vital personality makes him so hard to catch.

Even if you did put him in a cage, he’d get out (see Ultimate Houdinis).

And if not, it would upset you more to see him stop trying.

Dr Elsbeth McPhee of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh discovered that the more generations mice spend in captivity, the less likely they are to take protective measures when presented with a simulated predator (in this case, a matboard cut-out of a great grey owl, “flown” above the enclosure, presumably by a unionless grad student).

A mouse can maintain its agency in spaces proscribed as private homes as well as those that aren’t, and even those built and bought and maintained to be free of life—halls of stolen treasures in the Louvre; Kensington flats, flickering in the glow of an unobserved fire half a postcode away—but when their framework is restructured (or given structure), they let things happen to them.

They will latch onto objects they can control—the seeds in the tray, the dripping lip of water through the bars, the configuration of sawdust, and cede stewardship of the things they can’t—their surroundings, their neighbours, their own wellbeing.

Control, like captivity, is imposed and apportioned.

These limitations can reteach any sort of life—seagulls snatching Quavers from the Keystore shelf, roots navigating concrete yawns—but their source is human.

Freedom must also be, in that—without inventing the alternative—there would be no need to taxonomize it.

Besides, your tenancy agreement says you can’t keep pets.

//

The Nutella in the traps grew little white hairs, and empty bottles edged the contingency closer to the front of the fridge.

Time to assess your limits.

You grew up in a drafty skeleton in Old Kilpatrick and are used to images of bisected field mice, ransacked poison trays bleeding veins of blue crystals round the house, ending at tiny, contorted limbs.

You shared a room with your brother. One night, he left a glass of Robinsons on the drawer. In the morning, a dead mouse bobbed tail up in the drink. From the juice stains on the wood around, the way rigor mortis caught claws digging at the bottom of the glass, you gathered he didn’t pass peacefully.

You weren’t the one that killed them, but there was a complicity in knowing these things were—with the exception of juice boy—done on your behalf.

For a while, you would dump poison in the bin, drop pens and toothpaste tubes on primed traps, but you stopped subverting when you started noticing holes chewed in your trainers.

Would setting the trap yourself feel any more deliberate?

The question answered itself as he ran for the hoover and you nearly tore the fixture from the wall saving him.

In the moments after, kneeling in a puddle of Douwe Egberts and assessing the damage to the plug, you realised you could either be content with the company or be a hypocrite.

Since then, he has not returned—he has no reason to think charitably of you, and can’t know the hoover was an accident, can’t know what a hoover is.

Whatever camaraderie you inferred from repeated proximity was one-sided—even that Friday you were working past 1am, forfeiting overtime to amend for procrastination through the week, when he watched in solidarity from the radiator, slinking away when you looked up.

Although he initiated every interaction, your acknowledgement ended them. Maybe if he’d let you know he was coming you could have kept your cool and he might have stayed a little longer, helped with the dialogue. Moving through the flat at night, you will sometimes catch the silhouette of a great grey owl in the mirror.

It’s a shame he no longer feels comfortable living with you, but it’s the only explanation for his absence you can stomach.

It’s unreasonable to think yours is the only home he flits through—your neighbours may not have been so comfortable sharing their space, or maybe one of the dogs in the building got him, or those cats who spend the nights fighting in the back court.

You hope not.

You change the bait in your Big Cheese traps, watch the radiator when you work, and will your reflection to become less avian. You probably won’t see him again, but if you do, you are determined to be unsurprised.

Sean Turner McLeod is a writer and editor living in Glasgow. His work can be found in Litro, Maudlin House, SPAM, and Pleiades. He is the co-author of a hybrid pamphlet, forthcoming with adjacent pineapple, and his essay, "Lamprothocene", is forthcoming in translation with Queltehue Ediciones. Right now, he is very tired.'

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