Celery Sagas

Celery on the Wall, First Variant

Shortly after speaking with the man on the houseboat, I meet G at the restaurant which has a stalk of celery painted on the wall. The celery stands alone, uncoupled, mural-less. G orders a drink which can later be used to seed a Chia Pet. She solicits my advice on how to proceed with the discovery of her father’s phantom movies. A phantom movie is a film that has not been screened, a film that may even have gone missing before it was filmed. The phantom film exists in various stages of development, which is not what G wants to discuss. She found the films in a black plastic box in the garage. The black box also contained a bong and a book. The book claimed that the creation of idols marked the beginning of fornication. This only matters if you are one of those people who thinks King Solomon’s mistake was being seduced into taking foreign wives. G believes her father’s phantom films may include images from her own childhood. She wants to see them before he dies. He is a man, she reminds me, and a man is the sort of mammal who wills the garage and the house and the box with the bongs and phantoms to his third, fairly foreign wife. At no point in this conversation do I find a way to mention what just occurred a few blocks away from the restaurant with celery on its walls. It is unmentionable. It is happening as G speaks so I cannot mention it yet. But I can acknowledge on paper that two people are shot in a drive-by that seems to have been an accident as G and I drink and discuss the past. My most painful, romantic break up was losing that therapist, G confides.

Celery on the Wall, Second Variant

On the wall of the restroom in the dentist’s office, there is a painting by Normal Rockwell titled Freedom from Want. The painting sits directly across from the toilet, and I find myself reflecting on it while trying to relax and defecate. Freedom from Want depicts a large family gathered around a feast, each face beaming like a tiny smile-bead on an American rosary. It is best to be omitted from splendor which requires participation, the leaking of not looking, the manners of restlessness when aroused. To give you a sense of the problem we are having, the man will no longer look at me when he speaks.

Celery in “Small Bites”

“love precedes us to the grave and follows us into it.”— Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

Like Jenny Boully when first meeting Butch, I mistook “my hermeneutics of suspicion” for “having brilliant thoughts.” I, too, nibbled celery in “small bites” at the crossroads between taking responsibility for my errors and seeing a licensed therapist. Having experimented with therapy during the prior year—and having learned that I had, in fact, been emotionally abused and spiritually neglected by my work-driven, immigrant parents—I, too, confused “healing” with an overdetermined interpretation of life as construed by an American raised on sitcoms. I resembled the therapist more than I resembled my dog, Radu. The therapist, too, had earned her PhD in the hope of helping others survive, if not thrive, amidst the daily accumulations of unfairness administered by the market’s invisible hand. And I, too, believed that drinking carrot juice could extend one’s life. But the therapist avoided the verb extend and seemed uncomfortable with the noun life, electing instead to wield a larger treasure (and to lift this treasure inside the room and hold it to the light), which is to say she often referenced longevity, an abstraction which shaped our conversations into a shadow that bore an uncanny resemblance to substantial, time-consuming friendship wherein one of us paid the other one to take her side in invisible battles, after running a metal detector through the ocean of childhood memories for potential slights so as to make beeping noises when stumbling upon any hidden, demonic enemy. It has been raining for three days. I dropped my car keys in a puddle just to watch my reflection shatter. This does not explain why Karl Marx hated celery and why, unlike Engels, Marx refused to consider celery as a snack in itself rather than a garniture for a stew or a vegetable casserole. More than anything, and without rhyme or reason, in a manner which can only be described as modus volens, I, too, chewed the celery at the fork in the road and pretended to maintain a personal relationship.

Celery, Cowboys, and Critique

Theodor Adorno hated cowboy movies and celery. “Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse,” Adorno admitted. A god named Odin sacrificed one eye in order to be able to see more with the other—to have a single, extravagant, all-seeing eye. Modern cinema can still be enjoyed by those who lack peripheral vision. I have already mentioned that the creation of idols coincided with the commencement of fornication, specifically, how King Solomon’s mistake began with his taking of foreign wives—with his seduction by women who spoke other languages. Two people are shot in a drive-by that seems to have been an accident. I have already mentioned the friend whose most painful break-up involved losing a therapist. I will now mention my ex-husband, who calls me to say he has discovered the meaning of patience today. Of the song by Guns N’ Roses titled “Patience.” It’s about simultaneous orgasm, he says very seriously. In the song, the male is urging the female to slow down so they can come together. “The psyche lusts to be wet,” said Heraclitus. My beer is tangy, sour, like something brewed and poured by monks on a mountain, and I hear what my ex-husband is saying, but I don’t want to begin a conversation on the day after an American scholar determined that Marilyn Monroe’s white skirt, blowing above the grille, was a form of anasyrma, an ancient Greek ritual lifting the skirt to ward off evil. But we haven’t talked in a while, my ex-husband says. And so I begin talking, or speaking, or expounding upon a thought that has been bothering me, about Rome and Greece, or somewhere near Greek roads leading to marketplaces. Scattered there, along those roads, near squares, are certain statues called Herms which served as milestones. These Herms included stone pillars or plinths surmounted by busts of Hermes, intended as monuments to honor Hermes in his role as god of commerce and commercial activities. The Herm’s arms were outstretched to hold fresh flowers. There is a bronze Herm from the first century AD who lost its arms, though not its penis. After seeing this tall stone pillar with a scrap of a head and a penis in its center, I was perplexed.

Celery and Paranoia Prior to Thunderstorm

“There’s a frenzied wind blowing. I can’t work. The weather has worn me out. I’m ready to lay down and bite my pillow.” Anton Chekhov wrote this in a 1902 letter to his wife, Olga Knipper. He had just finished “The Bishop,” his second-to-last story. He was forty-one and would die at forty-four. I am forty-four yet absolutely and figuratively decades younger than celery. None of us knows when we will die. This is why everyone is alone at midnight in the gas station parking lot, alone and weeping as Roy Orbison sings “In Dreams.”

Celery as Related to Etymology of Romance

In addition to the man from the houseboat, the man from the tango class, and the man from the dream, there is also the man with whom I share a small studio flat. This man with whom I barely even live said another man left a message on my phone concerning a particular recipe which involved—or possibly implicated—țelină. This is the Romanian word for celery, I told the man. It sounds very similar to the Greek word, selinon. The Greek word is the Romanian word’s mother. But there is a problem: selinon refers to parsley in Greek, while pătrunjel is the word for parsley in Romanian. Both celery and parsley belong to the Apiaceae family, alongside carrots and parsnips, but țelină cannot call selinon its mother without abandoning celery entirely. The man said no one’s mother could be trusted or translated. On the other hand, history had spoken quite clearly about the likelihood of incest and cousins. The man confirmed that he did not believe in translation for precisely this reason. And precisely because celery had entered English from the mid-seventeenth-century French word, céleri, there was no reason to believe monogamy had ever existed. Rather than focus on the familial issues of the French, I directed his attention back to the Romanian question. A man may have eyes like tenderized pătrunjel but only when he wrecks his car will someone notice that his brain is filled with țelină.

Kunstmärchen with Celery

Rain carves little creeks into the lawn. Water erases the archives of foot marks on grass. It is sad. Footpaths are the way to getting lost in a forest in any story. One could measure the years by how tightly the dirt is packed. The man and I joked about roller coasters. He expressed a particular fondness for that sensation of being at “the peak” while I mused on my allegiance to functionalism, or that cycle of comings and goings that defies any journey with a designated endpoint. “I despise roller coasters,” I told him. There was truth to this.

The next part should be spoken as if told to a stalk of celery by a woman standing near a large window, admiring the missing footpaths. He was a good-looking ghost, my first love. First diminutive. First car wash as a couple. First rose beneath a windshield wiper. First spilled-drink cinema date. First reckoning with astrology because what must combust is Aries + Aries. First shameless blush. First finger through the belt-loop of a new wilderness. First He-kindled fire. First half-eaten frond of fern to come. First mix-tape with multiple Dire Straits songs. These claims come back to haunt us. Only celery knows why I am still surprised to find him nearby. 

This is the part about wandering into the forest, despite the warnings of friends and family. The ghost lures the girl with the promise of hopscotch. We don’t have rocks but there is a bouquet of celery in my hands, a bouquet with seven stalks. “Bring your celery,” the ghost says. “Hopscotch.” His scent twists upon itself like a novelty finger trap. One navigates scents with caution. This isn’t your first time in the forest. You walk through the window like a little red hen who wants something feverishly. For the first time. Again.

Now the ghost should remind me who is the boss like a snare drum in a jazz set. The girl tries to convince the ghost to sit in the hammock of a frat boy left between two trees. I could be a body, if that’s what he wanted. If being was what he missed. Having been a body before, I could easily replicate the past in the name of the present. But the ghost refused to join me. Lacking a body to meet me in it, he preferred to stand. I swung back and forth, alone. But with company. The ghost had one eye, like most ghosts. He was not dead enough, this old flame with a penchant for early Henry Miller. Position is not superstition. Habit is not belief. A beetle buzzed near my ear and then it hit me: “Is this about Bordighera?” There: where we were the couple making a scene in the plaza. The ghost of a man accused me of playing at things insincerely. How can there be a game if the players don’t believe by the rules? I never cared to win. I didn't want a monument or a trophy. Sex is rhetoric.

The next part involves writhing upon the hammock alone. He dreamt of snakes while we were in Bordighera. With sandwiches torn down the middle, we sat on a grave and talked about games. The discussion was difficult. He served as director. The writer’s pen was capped. The streets smelled of rotting fruit and diesel fumes, half the faces obscured by sunburn. His fingers sank into my forearm like a fancy metal cuff, an Egyptian bracelet, and all I could think to say was not Proust again. All I could think was that jealousy was not a sign of love though mistrust might be its primary symptom.

Celery in Problematic Local Contexts

I learned about this from the man in my tango class who was well-versed in the theaters of Western imperialism. This man in my tango class said he hated dancing but attended the class as a scholar of imperial stagings, theatrics which drove the upper and middle classes to what he called emotional precipices but which I designate more simply as extremes. According to the man, there was a book club—the Everyone Is Welcome Book Club—which arose from this felt need, or emerged when some of these emotional extremists felt called to read more books about their own power, their country, their nation, their language. Although the threat was louder than white noise machines during naptime at an urban Montessori school, the threat as articulated in felt calling resembled that noise which pretends not-to-be noise, and this resemblance liberated serious activists from considering the theaters of other empires and freed them, for example, from taking other places seriously in a way that would risk allowing the misfortunes of the Eastern Global North or the Global Southwest to distract them from the rising cost of nannies and the intersectional octopus of international labor trafficking which they preferred to combat only in its sexually fetishistic forms. The current event is a sort of currency and one bets on which one will do best on the market, one of the women said, quoting her publicist. This was problematic. The problem was the threat of the theater of western imperialism in contemporary literature, but the reality could not overlook that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Aurora Leigh, had admitted: “Man’s violence, not man’s seduction, made me what I am.” The man who told me this identified as a temporal extremist.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her most recent book is a poetry collection titled My Heresies (Sarabande, April 2025). More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Published July 15 2025