NICHOLAS YINGLING, FEATURED IN THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Minimalism

You’re supposed to pray
to each item, Make me happy.

Or is it, Do you make me happy?
Either way you end up the center

of an empty room. Imagine
a language with the same word

for nothing and god, the difference
being one is staged like an aria,

the other written as size:
zero-zero. When the fires came

what else was there to save?
A suit and gown in matching bags?

That calm light the fridge opens
when there’s nothing left to eat?

Nicholas Yingling on “Minimalism“:

There’s much discourse around Marie Kondo. Something about the ill effects of late capitalism being assigned to the individual or choice rubs people the wrong way. Still, some of us desire order, control, some meaning in materialism. During a particularly nasty fire season, when the air was full of other people’s debris, I thought of her and I thought of Tracy K. Smith’s “The Weather in Space.” That poem ends on an image of people, most alive when panicked, chasing after what they might lose. 

I am most alive when losing, but I can’t say I’m all that panicked. For as long as I can remember, I’ve exhibited disordered eating. It extends beyond food actually. It’s a self-denial. It’s a relationship to being embodied and being in the world. Popular texts like Joan Brumberg’s Fasting Girls suggest that modernity and the middle class shifted the context of anorexia from religious asceticism to something more or less “bougie.” Perhaps. But what is that feeling in ritualized loss? I want to say it’s spiritual. That’s dangerous, of course, and part of recovery is trying to imagine a healthy relationship to consumption. Part of recovery is imagining yourself as an object in the room, something to keep, something that makes you happy.

Nicholas Yingling is the author of The Fire Road (Barrow Street Press, April 2024). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with an aging pitbull named Clementine.