Party Baby

An excerpt from the final chapter of ALPHABET, and some announcements.

Good morning, ducks! I’m very happy to say that I officially regained the English rights to my first two poetry collections. It’s been a ride, and I can’t wait to be excluded from the narrative.

I can’t announce anything yet, but I’m planning something really special for Branches and Grocery List Poems (Rhiannon’s Versions). To everybody who’s sent me kind messages over the last year: thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart. It truly means the world to me.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in supporting my work, I self-published my undergraduate thesis COMPUTER ROOM (2020)! It’s poetry and prose about growing up as a girl-child online. It won the Dean’s Prize in Humanities and the Thompson Prize for Most Outstanding Thesis at UCLA, and I completed that edition under the Internet Research Initiative helmed by Professor Leonard Kleinrock. He sent the literal first message online ever. Trippy!

For readers in Los Angeles, I’ll be reading June 30 at the Earl for Taylor Woolstenhulme’s series, Perverted by Language. There’s a bunch of great people on the list, and I’ll have chapbook copies of PARTY BABY, which is the thing you’re about to read. PARTY BABY is a novella; it’s also the final chapter of ALPHABET, the Russiky epic I’ve been futzing with for a decade. The PARTY BABY chapbook is an IRL-exclusive treat for now, because I don’t have time to set up my website again. Stay tuned, and enjoy the first 1,626 words of PARTY BABY!

Every moment spent using English is a waste of my life. Increasingly, I feel this way. Please, please. Let this be worthwhile.

If it were possible, then I would trade the entire American publishing industry for a doughnut. By “trade”, I mean pure annihilation, and by “industry”, I mean everyone. Anybody involved in the production and distribution of the pulp that passes for literature all across the Greatest Country in the World, save for the postal workers and low-wage bookstore clerks: they would all be vapourised. The liberal editors with their privilege checklists and tote bags, the conservative grifters with their poor fashion and buzz words. Moneybags at the top, sensitivity readers performing the work of mediocre state functionaries, publicists who slice their authors into consumable identities, book bloggers eager to accept literature in the neon forms of merchandise. Plus the authors themselves, of course. All the proud Americans scribbling and gossiping within the imperial core.

Every happy graduate slithering up the ladder, from prodigious adolescence to a censored liberal arts education and into some state-backed graduate programme. Each of the bloggers turned influencers turned essayists and poets, hawking their books as merch, alongside sweatshop tee shirts, for their insipid fans. The readers themselves form the root of the issue. Unfortunately, I still believe in free will. God knows that people choose, actively, who to pay attention to, who to support, what to believe. So I don’t have much patience for the consumers elated to roll in the fetid debris produced quarterly by the American publishing industry. Whether they consider themselves intellectuals or populists, part of some privately-bankrolled edgy underground scene or lauded across the bestseller list. You can tell what school a person went to by who praises them. You can tell even more about a person by what compliments they accept.

All of this would go into the fire. In return, I would receive one doughnut. Cheap, stale, a pale coating of sugar to cover up the weak dough. A burst of synthetic red. The aftertaste of cherries. And then, for a full moment, I would be happy for the first time in my life. This is my wish.

Naděžda Plíšková

I wanted to kill myself. I was in New York. It was the week of the Brooklyn Book Fair. Surrounded by people whom I detested in a slow, languid way, I moved robotically through the city.

It was humid. Years of bizarre arguments, passive-aggressive asides, snide whispers: But who am I to judge. I didn’t say this, but. Would you mind if I was mean for a sec. Sorry. Can I just get this off my chest.

Real quick.

I hated America. I hated its roads, the tar poured hotly over God’s perfect earth for the sake of their psychotically large cars, as though they would encounter an improvised explosive device on the way to Whole Foods. The national victim complex made manifest.

I hated their restaurants, loud and metallic, overpriced vaguely organic options still leaking with manufactured hormones on mass-produced plates. There was no culture in America. Its language was slogans, its anthems were commercial jingles promising paradise after one more non-recyclable soda can, one more injection. There was no destiny because they had no past.

The American God: Puritan yet Neo-Pagan, cannibalistic above anything else. A void. A deity made solely of stigmata. When the rabbi Jesus Christ prayed before his Crucifixion in the holy gardens of Gethsemane alongside his ministering angels, and bore witness to all the mortal, deadly sins of humanity and each of our sick permutations, he saw America.

He saw children swearing allegiance to a flag that would not protect them before crouching under their desks, inside closets, to practice mass shooter drills. To rehearse their small deaths.

In Gethsemane, Jesus saw Black Friday. He saw the speculative financial markets crash, and families starve for lack of a breadwinner, and mothers-of-four-under-six fight each other for the right to purchase flat-screen televisions produced across polluted seas by other people’s dying children.

Saturday, which should bring rest, peace, the sweet exhale of Halvdalah fragranced with myrtle and honey, was instead dedicated to a programme called “Saturday Night Live”, the closest instance of true national unity I could observe from my vantage point as a foreigner. SNL, they called it intimately, was broadcast “live from New York” roughly each week, excepting their fake holidays— Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, et cetera. It was a “comedy show” staffed by the degenerate children of the country’s 20th-century B-listers. My father enjoyed it in the 80s, when they “had access to better cocaine”.

During their season, the cast writes and performs a series of “topical” skits with the same detached, pseudo-absurdist irony I came to expect from the American literary scene, as well as the troglodytes I used to meet for бранч. SNL was hosted by a new A-Lister and musical guest every episode, sometimes the same person, as the crowning tip of their respective press tours to promote whatever regurgitated slop of media which passed for “culture” in that backwater. SNL was considered the cutting edge of comedy. Cast-members were not infrequently replaced upon discovery of old, treyf, undeleted postings to the public Internet. Brooklyn gossip suggested that one of the more popular younger writers, the usual floppy-haired metrosexual whom I usually went for when I still took hormonal birth control, had been credibly accused of date rape by several women. He remains on the show, I believe. The budget for SNL was 4 million US dollars per episode as of February 2025.

So, Sunday. Once upon a time, the nice Jewish boy was flayed alive for the pleasure of the immortal mob. He woke up in a dark place. The dirt was cool and solid under him, instead of the heat and ephemerality he had just emerged from. He rubbed his eyes.

Stood carefully, feeling his hands along the dusted walls of a cave. His hands were whole again. He felt along his head: the crown of thorns was gone, those wounds healed. He touched gently under his bloodied cloak, knowing what he would find but still so grateful to feel the smooth skin whereupon the spear had pierced his side. His side. His stomach! God, but he was a bit hungry, no? Ach but wouldn’t Ma be making pancakes around now, with the fresh eggs all scrambled with a bit of good yellow cheese? A cup of black tea, that’s what he needed, or maybe coffee.

Seeing Ma and holding her and telling her it was all fine, went grand, just how he said. Then a bath, definitely, then maybe going down the road and seeing if Miss Mary wouldn’t mind having a walk with him. Spring was so beautiful in Al-Quds. All those white Easter lilies. He should get a bunch for the house, for her, for anyone else he saw on the road. So much to do, so much to look forward to. Oh, Lord. Oh, why was I ever afraid?

Then, however many years later in America: millions of my generational cohort contract what they call the “Sunday Scaries”, which means they were a bit nervous to send and receive emails from their apartment offices.

I could keep going, but you always rushed me, so let’s get speed through the American week: Black Monday, Black Tuesday, the Wednesday that the CIA confirmed their Area 51 existed, plus Thirsty Thursday as the primary base of their “academia”. Ivory tower, et cetera, ad infinitum.

And then back to Thank God It’s Friday, your own lucky day, Jesus’s old Sabbath day, which his chosen people (of whom we are lucky members) sometimes spent gleefully re-posting footage of His old Holy Land bombing more children so hard that there was nothing left for their remaining family, or neighbours, or international aid workers, to attempt burying. Israel, nation of nations, turning newborns to red mist with the full spiritual consent and financial support of America, the greatest country in the world.

There was culture within America, hidden and quietly cultivated within certain neighbourhoods, block parties, voting demographics. There were gasps of new potential, or echoes of the ancient civilisations that had flourished on the land before the fifteenth century. Old men teaching board games to their local children. Cookbooks, superstitions. Better ways to pray, to celebrate. Teenage girls styling their mothers’ hand-me-downs for the current season.

Springsteen, Simon, Baez. The Beach Boys, even. Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Abel Meeropol. Any song written by a factory worker or slave. Certain films, novels. Joan Didion ashing her long cigarette upon the golden heads of fat Malibu toddlers. The dead promise of Emma Lazarus, my namesake. Blue jeans.

The original recipe for Coca Cola. The kaleidoscope waft of a suburban mall: warm salted pretzels and one thousand glittering body sprays and lipstick and linoleum and sugar, so much blessed sugar.

But the entity itself had no taste, scent, anything. It was fake plastic grass under the fluorescent lighting of indoor gymnasiums. Endless exercise, no finish lines.

He saw all of this, Mr Christ did. Smelled, tasted, heard, felt, and Little Yeshua, our Yeshukele, still decided to die for our sins. For this American life. The dream.

For a long time, I knew that to be a mistake.

God also makes mistakes. I was 25, during this final late summer in Brooklyn, so I was sure of that fact. I knew better than God. I had met several divine missteps, kept meeting them. The winds of fortune pushed me towards people that I frankly should have shot without further questioning to save on overtime, if nothing else. Taxpayer dollars.

I am not American. In 2023, I did not know what I was. I do now. Perhaps you recognise me.