Lehman Weichselbaum
Two Reviews
ON THE BORDERS OF BELONGING by Althea Romeo Mark. Kelsay Books, 2023. $17
EVERYONE IS GAY WHEN THEY MASTURBATE by Rhett Sever. Maxwell Spencer Grape Productions, 2023.
In On the Borders of Belonging, Althea Romeo Mark rides migrations of family and other representative figures (fictional
or real not specified) from a variety of generations and home ports to the ambiguous havens of the West Indies and elsewhere
in the hemisphere (“Parents left play-mamas to hold the fort at home/while they went off to Santo Domingo, Cuba,/Panama,
Venezuela, Georgia and Florida,/to toil in fields and on roads,/to become builders of other nations.”) In presenting her deeply
felt tales of trying, intermittently successful adaptation to a New World, Mark always keeps her breath and her cool.
She tells her wanderers’ stories in the epic aggregate (“They go where their bare feet take them,” “They stand before us/like
potential of buyers/of freshly caught fish,” “We travel on whims, belief in God,”) or distinctively etched individual
vignettes: an uncomfortable shopper at second-hand stores, a schoolgirl at odds with classmates, a street sweeper relishing
his recently acquired freedom, a fugitive from a racist mob.
Balancing prose and poetry in pleading her case for a dispossessed people, Mark often allows the expository to get ahead of
the lyrical. Nevertheless, she demonstrates that she knows how to deliver the incandescent image where needed.
Refugees march like soldiers
retreating from a war,
salvaging what is precious,
their loves, their lives.
Refugees are hermit crabs
washed up on unfamiliar shores.
They search for new shells to occupy.
Their shells must fit like new skin.
(“Home Hunters”)
If Shecky Greene and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a baby, it would be Rhett Sever. His self-published book of pensées, Everyone
Is Gay When They Masturbate, spills with the raucous ruminations of a “very hot for an ugly guy” gay former Middle American
Mormon, turned New York “bear cub go go dancer” and standup comic.
Sever helpfully if somewhat loosely groups his meditations under categories like “family,” religion,” “work,” “sex” and “me.”
There are throwaways like “My mother gave me a huge stack of self-help books for self-esteem….but when I realized I needed
that much help….it didn’t do much for my self-esteem.”
Or he drops a bomb packed with the sagacity of a Spengler:
There may be up and downs, but we generally progress over time. There was slavery, now we have disproportionate police brutality.
There were witch burnings wtih faggots at the bottom, now we have the pay gap and getting fired if you’re gay….Thank the lord (who
doesn’t exist) for social evolution!
(from “NASCAR: The New Public Hanging”)
Other pearls (some drug enhanced) include how Madonna saved the author from suicide, the universe’s solution to its own
sense of boredom, a cheap but effective pun playing on Trans Am versus trans-man and the you’ll-never-guess key to what
makes Meryl Streep the greatest actress of all time.
Out of pain grows comedy, comedians always remind us. Writes Sever: “Thank God for oppression!…All you wonderful, crazy
bastards of the world made me the proud, sad clown I am today!” And, in turn, from comedy comes wisdom. We can also
submit, along with Sever himself, that this precious alchemy is a high-water mark of human growth as a species. Hail our yukster overlord Rhett Sever!
As I get older I get less and less comfort from my Beanie Baby collection.
I mess them all up so I get to reorganize them again!
It quiets the voices.