Anti-Genre #5 reflects on our latent sources of discomfort, disorientation, and disarming. Brent Raycroft explores the “danger of the public sphere,” or the many inchoate ways that memory collides with present-tense acts.


Trigger Warning

After the spoiled spoiler alert that we die in the end and the fine print reminding
us anything can happen between now and then, what need for a trigger
warning? I can understand it on the news — we need to be told just when to turn
that shit off. And yes, let Facebook throw greyest of gauzes over the blood. But if
it’s an evening of fiction or poetry? Did we go in thinking we’d be comforted
only? Sweat it out if you can. Weep inside, your stomach hollow. Worst case
scenario, make a scene. Stand, when all are seated. Leave politely if you
sympathize. And if you’re angry ask, demand, the writer tell you why they chose
to be so mean. For who would admit right up front that the best they can do
might drive a sensitive person from the room? Or if that were the agenda — a
shocking confession, a strange experiment — who would volunteer to telegraph
the jump-scare and ruin it? Even ancient cuts are fresh, and the pressure of a
word can cross a threshold we did not expect. That’s the danger of the public
sphere. But grocers don’t put notices above the fruit because a square-jawed
general in the presence of a certain mix of smells falls sick with the remembrance
of a rising motion in the throat and cheek that looked at first like breathing but
was maggots heaving underneath. A tiny time-lapse or a weight of pain can keep
the brain from taking trauma fully in. We’re adept at hiding from ourselves what
happened only once or every day. So the trigger could be any chance adjacent
thing that the unpleasantness (let’s call it that) while going down attached a flag
to. A national anthem. A game show theme. A dirty joke. A blood spot near an
egg yolk. The font on the face of the wristwatch he wore. Wishing wells.
Machetes. Bright balloons attached by static to a wall. Toothpaste curling from a
tube. Niagara Falls. “Slowly I Turned” by the Three Stooges. Or whatever
happened to be on so that you poured your presence into it in order to be
somehow absent and never heard again until tonight this jerk rehearses it. The
barb whose pinch you half forgot is the tip of a quill. Snipped off short but in
there still. Acupuncture’s opposite. Enough to make you ill. He doesn’t even
know he’s touched it, the klutz. So who should be warning whom? And of what?