Tristeza
When our people came flat-packed and hand-delivered, I wanted to look for you. To make sure you weren’t there. That the dog running circles outside my window was just a dog. That the man sat atop my lap, and the man sat atop his, would leave - when asked nicely. That America, with all its pride, would hand us back your mother, unchained. Some things are just between us. A search-party waving from the highway. The walk that takes you over the border, under the river. I searched for you there too. Made sure that when the Late-Night hosts said America they meant Guantanamo. Meant Operation Condor. H.A. Kissinger. To what extent do you blame catastrophe on your TVs hidden symbols? Every fifth word is an anagram for terrorists. My grandfather is holding a picnic outside Fort Bliss. Pushing a box cutter against his reclining chair, the sound of notches, underwater. Did you count twenty-three or do you resent demographics? Can you remember what the sky smelt like, when your parents would let you sleep on their floor? When our fathers were rough and silent, in pockets for years? I’ve been labelling my sadness. This one sounds like your mother, ten-thousand wind-chimes on your old bedroom frame. Waiting for you. To what extent can language just stay there - laughing back? I start the morning by chasing the dogs out. This one sounds like a ripcord.
Baby
Yesterday I wanted to table-top dance for you with my perfect hair, no cavities. I’ve begun asking my neighbours to name five things that make me better than the other people we both know. This is because I can’t explain drowning, and when I deliver five kids from Juarez to your feet, they’re all dead. While this is mostly a metaphor, five mothers are always standing by my bed, asking me to give my place up. I’m considering this as I breastfeed my reflection, hand out free shots to boys with dirty blonde mullets, while the entire continent celebrates my poise, my perfect hair, this je ne sais quoi, and all together they wonder how my English has gotten so good. I tell them my first word was water. Or baby. But either way, I said it just like that: in another language. If you keep taking a right every time you’re about to get home - eventually you understand direction. A system of incompleteness. I take my head out with my teeth to scream into my country. It’s the perfect Sunday. California has burnt itself down and the peace-loving Bushwick suburbia is building golf-courses over my brothers. It’s a dozen a hand. History with its own cancer. We are rollerblading across the thighs of America and I want to win. Push my luck at the border. Polish shoes with a toothache. A licensed ontology. Spinning over the Gulf. Where the money goes. Where the ocean drinks light out of my refrigerator. Four-thousand birds falling. By official decree.
“Baby” first appeared in Propel Magazine.
Spring Time
I’ve been trying to walk out of my room. Get fucked by the sunlight, some loose-leaf ethos to hold above all of their heads, or slip youth wrecked into my back pocket; to say I am done with this. Say I am wound becoming wound. Light, becoming absence, learning to house you. Say I should be taking health concerns seriously. Do more than lay bare on the hot sheets of a neon motel, where there are no windows, only mirrors, and I lay on my back, and I wait for the sun. I do, sometimes, think of you, or the problem of emotional experience under capitalism, like the fact that when I say you, I mean myself. I mean an urgent need. And you see, I used to swallow knives before spring told me I might hurt myself, that I would do better to trip on the privately educated blade of one political disenchantment. Listen to the radio sing its usual bruises, listen to the best-seller aisle of human malice; and try to tell me this is the best we can do. Because, fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. The Holy Virgin licks sweet mango juice out of my Navel; America raises altars to strip malls, and military-backed democratisation projects, Europe looks like America, and Europe looks dead. The following chapter explores the commodification of social bonds and identity in more depth. Today there are wolves in Burgess park, futility is lacing the cramped spine of my bed, and I’ve been trying to walk into a wound like wounds know how to be swallowed; and I think of the people and by people I mean myself, I mean the world has no windows, only parking lots; and I lay on my back and I wait for the sun. Because fundamentally, it doesn’t matter.
i am forgetting what i called for
I told you there aren't many ways to write a love song without ending up with a short list of war crimes. That an emergency is after all just five girls saying I told you so. The way you read the instructions to suicide and come up with a poem. That a day without moving would, above all, require a strong mind. A family loan. To exist is to make a private event out of the sea rise. Imagining yourself on a radio show, explaining your childhood in punchlines. Everyone impressed by your humble beginnings. By the way you always carry a plastic bag around, trying to preserve some nature. The biosphere in your briefcase. I fell in love that very day. Writing from a city I’d never been in. Wanting my old body back. If you insist on writing a love song, make sure the first line is stolen. Accuracy in act. I told you there aren't many ways to cross a border without turning your head. That maybe the key to choosing the right partner is whatever Teen Vogue has to say about it. That the light-flashes may well be a warning, but they’re also one of life’s main attractions. And if you and your friends want to hold a funeral, the dead will come rushing. The cover band sponsored by NATO’s suburban plan. Back through the body and into the railroad. One final time. I told you that the dots between intention are better understood from the grave-digger’s viewpoint. At the sunrise shift. And if you have nothing better to do, I can stay right here with you and watch.
The great waste picker
Did I ever show you the unattached pause between confession? The prayer migrained from a child tugging it left, then right. You tell me the child is someone you knew, and I resist the urge to say: what a small world. Any day now I’m going to wake up angry enough to haunt you. Drink the battery spill from a wine glass. But when our friends started dying, you made a point to reach out. Said: I’m glad it wasn’t you. Said if they can fit an ocean into a headline, then surely you can find a way to touch it. To jump into the caves and find something singing. Whether or not you know what a note is.
At Set
God spends the entire night locked in the bathroom stall. Engraving all their clichés into the door with an army knife. And you, sat next to them, repeating: I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you. There’s an argument to be made for worship, but that’s not what I came here to tell you. Some days you have to push in with everything empty. Let the bartender know you’ve been cheated. How you meant to say something much more eloquent. How Angus is outside, smoking your cigarette, rolling down his symbols. The banality of youth taunting: watch me! Pushing a hit from her molars. Silver tongues rushed over a gram, asking: Are you down about the economy, darling? Are you feeling tragic? Look, I just wish you wouldn’t grind your teeth like that, not during a recession. It’s enough as it is that everyone’s front-lining some band. Some postmodern collective. And worse, and worse, you keep trying to climb over my back and sing me your song. It’s the third time tonight. Still, I would like to make everything about us. Bad mouth every flower; roses, lilies, the whole garden. Only Lucky is ringing out a crane’s neck in the red room, and I’m getting all sentimental about it. Waiting for the valves to go off in Tijuana. Knowing you’d like to believe them. You only get five minutes to teach yourself how to be gentle.
At The Amersham Arms
Angel pricks her index to the inside of my cheek, checking for wisdom. All my sisters bat their eyes. I lose my cool. Smoking to make conversation. That’s how loving works. Gravedigging in the alley of Lewisham's video store. I’m translating everything. Knuckles to desire. Your hand to her thigh. Twenty love poems and other nonsense. In the bathroom, eleven freaks are reenacting Mayakovsky’s suicide note. Believing maybe this is exactly what they want. A good fuck and a vision. The one hundred miracles of an alarm. Right beside you, the music stops. Angel is jaw open, pinned by her left wing. Make me a man, I tell her. Make me a man. Twenty love poems and no desperation. How the night ends inside you, to the left around her ribcage. Cum on your stomach, hands soaked, tied down. I want to watch you get bored of this. Read your poem in the multipurpose community room, and drink. With all the lights off. Angel shoots herself in the leg. Hopping over to the man in green swim trunks. A Royal Navy x Fendi collaboration. Angel. I know a communist when I see one.
At the Royal George
As we walk over the bending, two art majors push a metaphor into traffic. Elena disagrees whether or not this means we’re done for. There’s no good way to start this conversation. At the bar I can finally flaunt my paycheck. £3.65. You know a week passes at twenty-eight pence per minute, that before poetry there were graveyards toppled over by annotations. It’s a game to remember this much. People that you knew from university leaning against the wall, speaking about the people they knew from university, and maybe you’ve heard of them. But we should get together soon - seriously, it’s been too long. On the radio they’re confident that all guilty parties have been caught and there’s no longer any reason for alarm. We can be sure of that. I use the noise to hide from my friends. Become the kind of drunk that only looks backwards. I think of my father’s uncle, dying from just that. Perfect heirlooms. Our final round. Dear Patricia, your child is playing hopscotch below the poverty line. Stop airbrushing your workers on the security camera. There’s nothing to do here but watch us. Turning for a fix. Jasmine dies under the space-heater of a rented flat. Folds my beer into three perfect concentric circles. I’d ask you to help me out of this. But when the East-dream drummer starts keeping rhythm with the overground, Elena knows we got a purpose. Even if we end up two streets away, counting on the bartender. Convinced tonight is the night I should tell you I’m failing. And you shouldn’t worry, but ask me about it tomorrow.
There’s always something new to try
Mary walks in reciting some self-reflection. The ego loves to make us into a project. Like you’re a tragedy remembering itself. Like you can keep a parasocial relationship with your appeals. What I was saying is you don’t have to refute yourself just to feel something. You have still a fantasy for exile. Whatever you want to have tomorrow. And of course, this. There’s always this. Even when everybody comes in lousy-headed and feeling so free. That’s when you take a hammer to every mirror in the British Museum, ask someone to cry with you. Say I would like to be saved now. But that’s no one’s responsibility. You know that. Everyone knows as much. Still I can’t help putting all my favourite things onto the train tracks. At the busiest time. And for you, it’s probably getting repetitive. Did I tell you where I came from? Can I ask you what you’re thinking? It’s another one of those days. The murmur of contextualisation. Letting the moon scream profanities in the spirit of trying. Twenty dead pigeons everywhere.
