UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SPRING 2024 - Flipbook - Page 20
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
free-writing anything he could remember from
the collage and the reactions he had during the
meditation.
“Sacred Trash” directly addresses a collage of the
same title: “My daughter scribbles out / a stranger’s
face in the news- // paper—maybe // she saw
something in his eyes, / something she didn’t want
// to see.” And yet he goes on to examine how “...
no one knew what // was worth saving, or whose
hand / made anything // sacred,” before admitting
that, “Nothing // has changed. My daughter / draws
a picture of the two of us, // side-by-side, our arms
wide-- / this is what I’ll remember, // I tell myself.”
How do we know what to hold onto, what to let go
of? What is the meaning of a collage and how will
that meaning change over time? With no owner’s
manual, no one way to live a life, we are left to
count on each other remaining open, remaining
curious.
“Having a daughter was a very good thing, and
I hate to sort of think I’m using my daughter for
some sort of enlightenment, but I really feel that.
Right when she was born, I had a friend about
ten years younger than me, Ben Wizner, who was
having a party, and my wife was out of town. And
so I took my infant daughter with me and had her
on my lap. Ben asked, ‘What do you miss most
now that you have a kid?’ and it was such an odd
question because I was sitting there with this crazybeautiful child in my lap. It changed instantly—that
was my life.” As a long-time reader, I have been
privy to the adventures Flynn has undertaken with
his now-16-year-old daughter. He says he feels
lucky that she shares so much with him and his
wife about her life, wants to engage with theirs.
In many of the poems, Flynn directly addresses
words, their origins, and their iterations,
transformations, and transmogrifications. In
“Notes on a Monument to Ether,” he focuses on
words including “anesthesia” and “revelation,” with
“...when it comes to pain, you can either feel it or
you can numb it. / You spend too long in that realm,
wrestling with whatever it is you / hope to numb
yourself from feeling, & soon enough very little
else / will matter,” is followed three stanzas later by,
“To uncover, in the sense that it is revealing some
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deeper truth.” The poem is a deep dive into his past,
when “I / anesthetized myself daily with whatever
I could find,” when he worked in a shelter helping
others whose afflictions were worse than his
own. His fascination with The History of English
podcast is not uncommon in his line of work, but
his exploration of words in Low deep-dive into his
own encounters with how they help him better
understand both people and random connections.
But this poem is also teaching the reader how to
enter Low, how to walk or drive beside Flynn as
he asks us to look with him, to question with him.
In “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” he asks of us,
“Look // into the night, there must be / millions
like you, each looking back // at us. Maybe we are
all speaking to each / other, maybe we are showing
you how // we want to be held.” It is seeking human
connection that drives many to finding community
in a bar, as in “OOOO,” when he is in bar picking
up takeout, a woman, “runs a finger / along my
shoulder & says, I like your infinity shirt,” before
showing him her double-infinity tattoo. “What
does it mean / to have twice as much of what is
already terrifying?” he wonders. What if he had
still been in bars to drink rather than simply to get
food? And so this book also hosts an undercurrent
of Flynn’s long-term sobriety, his having found
community and human connection without
seeking the numbing he unpacks in poems such
as the aforementioned “Notes on a Monument to
Ether.” The poems in Low exhibit the in-the-present
awareness of someone who has overcome his need
for exiting the world through substances, who
embraces the wonder each moment might have
to offer. But, too, Flynn has been sober for so long
that his experience with the world has altered...
not in his desire to care for others and be part of a
community, but in his lack of need to find black and
white answers.
In both “Notes on Want” and “Notes on a Calendar
Found in a Stranger’s Apartment,” Flynn imagines
scenarios for strangers, poses possible narratives
for the unanswerability of what he witnesses. He is
at once inquisitive about what he is witnessing and
protective of the secrets he will never be privy to,
allowing the unknown to remain exactly that. Flynn