Photo by Daniel Schechner
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Set Designer
Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design,
unpaid, in the Poconos
where I would be forever traumatized
by the overpopulation of deer,
growths on their bodies and bald patches,
limping and scarred from being hit by cars,
and the one the crew called “jawbone”
that kept coming around
because its jawbone was hanging off, unusable, from its head
while the body wasted away
and I brought out mashed potatoes
that it lapped up with a long tongue.
We had to fire the creepy sound guy
who was clearly on drugs
and I found a big plastic gallon of Dewar’s
in the Airbnb cupboard
and a guitar
and got drunk alone on the deck of the cabin
amazed no one would join me.
I woke in the middle of the night
for my usual routine of self-hatred
until I realized how excruciating it all was
and instead wrote down on the set schedule
“remember how good it feels to be good to yourself”
carrying it around with me ever since.
Hoping I will.
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Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House Book / Octopus Books, 2014), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She hosts Ode & Psyche Podcast, and lives in Vermont.
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Detail from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (medieval French; now hanging in the V&A, London)
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Author: Terence Winch
