Joanna Acevedo

Joanna Acevedo is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of three books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021) and List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Litro USA, Hobart, and the Rumpus. She is a guest editor at Frontier Poetry and The Masters Review and a member of the review team at Gasher Journal, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2022 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing and interviewing skills for both nonprofits and corporations, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.

Small Mechanics

When the Icelandic bury their dead, Currie says, they plant a tree. So the tree grows out of the heart of the body that was buried. 

      The graveyard is full of both trees and headstones. I find one that says Johanna, 1921-1923. Her birthday is 3/15, mine is 4/15. I shiver at the almost-coincidence. She didn’t live very long, Currie says. Maybe those two years were really good, though. 

      You can’t do much with two years, I say. I feel like I’m just starting, and I’m twenty-five. 

      Here, it gets dark at four-thirty, and stays dark until around ten in the morning. Currie warns me that during the summer, people go a little crazy from all the daylight, and in the winter, the constant darkness is hard on everyone. My flight, which is a red-eye, gets in at 5:28 a.m., the wheels shuddering as they touch down on the tarmac. The dark has a velvety quality to it, a blueness that I can’t totally describe. The sky seems bigger here, more vast, and the air smells of sulfur. 

      Currie picks me up from the airport. We ride in his enormous borrowed truck from Keflavik Airport through the lava fields, which are briefly illuminated in the headlights. He tells me about the small population, the tourism, and we discuss the novel I finished on the plane, Rachel DeWoskin’s Banshee. Rachel is a personal friend of his. I’m so tired that everything feels surreal—the foreignness of the street signs, the largeness of the truck, the caffeine from the latte I purchased with krona making me jittery. He makes smooth hairpin turns. 

      There’s an energy to this place, Currie says, as we drive towards a discount supermarket to pick up milk, later that day. A magic. I feel it too, a kind of humming electricity that seems to be coming up from the ground itself, permeating the air. Iceland feels ancient, special. I’ve never been to a more beautiful or confusing place. 

      It begins to rain, and thirty-mile-an-hour winds gust up around Currie and Anne’s little farmhouse, which is situated directly on the Atlantic Ocean. Jet-lagged, I fall asleep on the couch. 

Something about the people in Reykjavik, Currie says, is that wherever they live, they always have to be able to see some body of water. We walk around downtown, past tourist shops and around a pond filled with ducks eagerly snapping at bread. You can see the ocean from down avenues and streets, the color of green glass. I breathe heavily walking up the highest hills, but Currie doesn’t seem perturbed. 

      Every person we meet is undeniably friendly, talkative, and smiling, their reddish cheeks bright from the cold. There’s a cheer to the people here, a likability that I haven’t found in other European countries. We drop in on several of Currie’s friends and drop Anne off at her book group, before heading back to the little apartment where I fall asleep on the couch for yet another stolen hour. 

      I don’t know how to maneuver here—the street signs unreadable, people’s accents thick and unfamiliar. The foreignness is electric and fascinating. At the restaurant we go for dinner, some of the words on the menu are false cognates, written in bold Icelandic block letters. Anne says something about vegan wine and people being out to get her; Currie leaves his phone at home. It starts to rain. 

      As we eat with a friend of Anne and Currie’s, who tells us about her misbehaving teenage son, the rain gets thicker, harder, torrential. We watch it through the windows as it falls in sheets. This is a magical place, I realize, the darkness full and complete. Over tea in the little apartment after dinner, we compare airplane stories.

      Part of the magic is being here with them—two people I know well and yet do not know at all, secret friends who have adopted me into their lives like a long lost cousin. Anne is constantly spouting bits of wisdom in her awkward way, little scraps of brilliance. I want to follow her around with a tape recorder and catch these bits and pieces, but I know that if I tried to capture her wonder, I would lose it completely. Currie is simply the most pleasant, pleasing person I have ever met—truly genial, a real people person, easy to talk to. 

      This trip is only a stop over on my way to another adventure. And yet I want it to last forever, the magic rubbing off on me like a scratch-off lottery ticket, something I’ll win and keep in my pocket till the end of my days. 

I wake at four in the morning, jet lag rearing its ugly head yet again. My flight out of Iceland is at 12:35pm., and I know that I’ll regret not sleeping through the night. The house makes strange noises, the refrigerator hums. I remember something Currie has said, about the wind being strong enough to take a car off the road. I can hear it rushing past the house in gusts. 

      Driving to the airport, we discuss re-reading, mutual friends. The lava fields are illuminated by the bright light of dawn. Anne retreats to her office before we leave, an underground bunker of a little room full of a desk, a bookcase, pens and pencils, only accessible by ladder. She appears just to say goodbye, making a remark about the patience of my shoes waiting for me by the door. I am so lucky, I think to myself, to have these friends who welcome me into their home, let me sleep on their couch, make me iced coffee by filling the French press and putting it in the fridge. 

      The sky is a broken piece of blue fabric, a whisper, a promise. In the enormous borrowed truck, we thunder along the road, diminutive cars dwarfed beneath us. I feel the heat and thrum of the engine beneath the seats. I can see the shifting of the earth, the cracks in the silt, the moss that grows through the spaces made by the volcanoes. I think of Anne’s book, of the way that lava moves—slow, then all at once.

So much of my life is waiting for something to happen, and yet in this thirty odd hours with Anne and Currie, inundated with the minutiae of their lives, the cups of coffee and pieces of toast, I see that all of life is waiting, reading, writing, listening to the music of voices. Anne’s is a life of quick remarks, big thoughts. Currie fills in the gaps with chit-chat and occasional brilliance and small mechanics. You have to do something, I tell Anne at dinner, explaining my work to her, my frustration with the people whose poems I am paid to edit. A poem is more than a set of observations. 

      The word “poem,” from the Greek, means “making,” she says. You have to make something out of it. I feel ridiculous explaining to her what she clearly already knows, like explaining Mentos and Coke to a rocket scientist. But in this moment we understand each other, a human echo, a set of commands. 

Poem, I think. To make, create. Perhaps this is the magic of Iceland after all. The constant volcanic activity, the continuous shifting of the rock, is an act of making. A living poem of a country, which inspires its people to make art, to create, from all angles. Maybe this is why we all feel drawn here. Maybe this is why we return, season after season, to the water, the gravel, the mountains, the endless dark sky, the elusive Northern Lights. 

At the airport, I check my email, respond to messages from editors who have wondered what has happened to me. I get a notice from British Airways saying my flight may be delayed. I have to catch a connection to Edinburgh, my next destination, so this is troubling. Already the magic is fading, replaced by the randomness and terror of everyday life, the lost wallets and dropped keys and missed flights. I want to take a handful of Iceland with me, but there is no way to capture the wonder. There is no more magic. 

      Hopefully, there will be more adventures. For now, there is only this: a woman in an underground office, a man behind the scenes making everything run smoothly, the wind making the shutters rattle, and dark, and quiet.