GREGORY LAWLESS

On Public Speaking


Make eye contact with your audience.

Take off your glasses, your shirt.

Show them your tattoos of hawthorns and tines of lightning striking the grasslands.

Share an anecdote about miracle snowfall in the fourth century, about abiding humanity in a wartorn country.

Read them your journals from your year at sea.

Everyone should spend a year at sea, you say, using yourself as an example.

An example of what? someone shouts from the back.

See here, you say, pointing: The chandelier filled with electric snow. The shivering crystal, we are all shivering crystal…

Someone coughs himself to sleep.

Shadows dash through the spotlight.

Do you remember? You say, thinking of something to say.

But it is quiet.

No one remembers.




Forever-voice


I use it in libraries.

At the DMV.

Passing through customs after a month on the ocean.


On a tour of the gulags.

It's a big hit at monasteries.


And I use it to plant little dreams in my mother.

Keep a garden, I say.

Call dad.

Take the cucumbers from your eyes.


Whenever you say: Where are you taking me? Forever.

What did the history teacher say to the eraser? Forever.


Darwin, on the Galapagos, counting turtle eggs:

Forever, forever, forever.


But no one can hear you.

Even now. No one is listening.


Bullshit, says mother.

I’m listening.