as perennial pipelines heat prairie homes
I dream of drifting oceans & waves of snow
effluence affluence
I have been told so many times & so many ways
this world is ending
omen amen
I’ve taken to stealing lines on borrowed time
censor center
somewhere in this self-immolation is discipline
the denomination of need
I. Writing; an act of stroking paper.
II. The aggressiveness of buying and selling resistance, as seen on TV, makes me wanna disassociate.
III. Competitions of sadness are trauma tiers.
IV. It’s ok that I don’t fit in she says.
V. If I write a word today, just one, that must be enough.
I almost never buy in bulk, although I appreciate the expression of commitment. My lack of bulk desire is rooted in one of those childhoods funneled through scarcity politics, of all kinds: spirit, body, voice, resources, access, stimulation. My earliest taste of cultural politics were synthetic extractions grounded in epic narratives of fatherly protection. A practice endured through sacrifice.
There was a seduction to all that nurturing, an attention and encouragement to focus on one’s most intimate self—the soul. If followed correctly, there would be saving.
In all that repetitive redemption, there was a sense of safety—false as it was. I ache for those early feelings of learning about abundance. When the simple was profound, like the sound of snow falling.
These days are starting to feel retrograde, astrologically speaking an illusion. My dreams are looping, again. I’m taking all these memories, the bulk of them, and feeling nothing but an offering to grieve for what was taken, withheld, starved. An invitation of acceptance, a different kind of suffering.
“Are we witnesses or actors?” – Carolyn Kizer from “Twelve O’Clock”
From a tender age, we learn to anticipate expansive boundaries. This is how we survived.
Our inheritances can be found folded into cornered spaces where silence occupies itself. A similar appreciation to realizing how much our eyes have adjusted to darkness. We trade today’s exhaustion for speculative futures. Assassinations happen daily.
Diversions become elegant beginnings when you realize resistance has immortal roots. That’s why performing for an absent savior is a dishonest practice and violence is a loop of fractured sounds. Do you hear that echo abdicating its own existence?
The sun feels yellow today. Birds still relay their news through song. Incantations woven over and through the roar of their own destruction. A natural and honest alchemy. Such revision signals there is enough, a gathering of effort.
When they ask how you survived this century, what will your answer be?
“As if a tenderness awoke, a tenderness that did not tire, something healing.”
— Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems; “Three Women,” (1962)
I was born into an isolated, literal Evangelical culture. A place where time was on always on trial and faith was righteous as pride. Our promised future had already been written. We were urgent. The rapture was past due.
All of us who knew even a fraction of the story internalized why Jesus hadn’t returned. Acts of a vengeful god are common and welcomed in this scenario. It was also true when you knew the ending tipped in your favor, knowledge became seductive. A blessing disguised.
To have learned about the world this way feels like a subtle theft. Trauma works that way too. False recognitions bound to real sounds, smells, touch, twists of phrases, and, if lucky, fading re-creations. A true con.
Decades later, I am still carving an existence that is receptive to invitation. There are no answers inside all these non-moments of relentless judgement. That clarity is its own rushed reality. Adapting gracefully to change is an ancient sermon. This is a map to all this undoing.
“everyone is a conscientious objector to something” — William Stafford (from Every War Has Two Losers)
The sun was warm. Flowers pop and stretch.
I sang softly into the deepest darkness.
I was not afraid.
Even here, I struggle what to say.
Bending under the weight of unwritten letters,
I want to succeed
differently.
Morning news push violent denials.
I wake softly into fading darkness.
I am not afraid.
“…I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political. If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new—a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to—we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy.”
—Denise Levertov, from her essay “Great Possessions,” January 1970
It is February. I think about ruts carved into thawing prairie soil—how violence echoes. I pull your sleeves right side out every time I do the laundry. Shapes of familiar ceremony.
In March, rusted satellites fall to the ground. I find the ocean, again. A litany of land and shoreline.
Then May repeats to the present day. Silver glints from in-flight airplanes catch the attention of wandering minds. Our elegies no longer unconscious prayers.
The frontlines have finally reached us.
We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about “and.” — Sir Arthur Eddington
I. virtual systems
we have learned to covet reflective virtual objects
on occasion, we can still recall vibrations of analog sounds
in a digital world fueled by fossils & compounded fabrications
I wrap my arms around you as car alarms blare songs of protection
II. echo as residue
our preferences fill shapes generated by algorithms gone wild
authenticated searches find radical stability
a looped sacred ceremony
III. curation
corn, cowboys, & cattle
broken buttons
violent light
[classed units of measurement or why it matters I want the horizon to never end]
“writing…is a process of relying on immediate pervasive feelings, not an escape from them…” — William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl. pg. 88
I haven’t found a way to say I love you that isn’t complicated, so I practice loving you every day. Sounds of terrorized children broke through all those hours of visual noise. Hope is a map. A place to begin.
The distance of decades doesn’t always make things quieter. Calendars are more form than function. I learned early and repeatedly that love must be earned, and value is measured by others. An intimacy of detachment.
Addicted to seeking approval is one way of saying yes unconditionally. Instead, imagine a private collection of silent hymns. These days, I take care to mend memories as a way to create acceptance. A public chorus swelled.
Broken into speculative practices, writing things down reinforces pleasure and importance in tandem. Together, through famine and fortune, what stands out is love. An oxygen where sacrifice is not born from competition.
sex scandals are time stamps
tenacious denials in constant motion
caught in the heart of our throats
we collect these daily reactions edited towards fortune
while retribution becomes a chimera as forthcoming
as justice or glacial landscaping or forgiveness
feelings are now citations of replicated intuition
ancient categories of visceral intimacy siding with self
sacrosanct representation (a politic)
swelling to release multiple truths
charming double entendres entwined
bound to furious calculations of power and risk
the way white anger colludes with fear
a curious seduction of inductive logic
recast as an approximate commitment to devotion
embraced invasions
meat, text, and soul
the length of a week
hands into bruised fights
The past is a space of eternal occupation, a place to shout violent things and lust for an afterlife. The present is active and in transit. What was is now future. For today focus on the perceived differences of a winter sun, how dedication can become a shroud, and the way throats absorb sound. Traces of a map, a line to pursue. Such directional shifts define evolutions of time. As the ocean laps shorelines, patterns artificial as intelligence bind like curses. Our days flare dandelion sunlight.
Our bones are built of spirals. – Joy Harjo
I.
our wildest prophetic imagination
has led us here: a shattering of sex
uncomfortable
deep
looking
II.
calm & concentrated
I saw two waves lock
like elk horns
then embrace
III.
truth of feelings
as charm offensives
as wet feathers
IV.
divine signs
pushing forward
V.
smoothness is both a measure and a lack of roughness
I have no body; the “I” writing this has no body: not in the old way. Zones. Pressures. Here a structured tension there an underlying ache. Vital signs. Phases of disquiet not clearly demarcated from areas of peace. — Laura Mullen, “Spectograms (projected autobiography),” Complicated Grief
Revolutions are frenetic desires. Seams stretch tight.
familiar stimulation: swelled power and impulse
Violence precedes peace when knowledge becomes ransom.
negative space: culture is public negotiation
Men speak in abstraction. Their distancing performative.
economies of scale: underwhelming demands for mass hysteria
Intuition anchored. Solicit.
Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein.
[Be conversant with transformation.]
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
i believe in omens
and my own ability to shatter and reform
— Jill Khoury, excerpt from “Sixteen”
oh righteous revelry
please indulge this faithful attempt to clarify
so many modern relationships still lean feudalistic
as nobles dance to blue note promises & scheme for eternal life
it rings visionary to trust what is mine was never yours to take
a redundant mythology now inadequate as waning winter light
temporarily, we sense an emerging surrender to the hushed hues of sexual panics
on a grand scale psychic interiors were smoothed flat like apathy or political truths
there was a collective ache for a state of respite from all this revolutionary suffering
as conviction loops into endless realities it is our sacred duty to carve out revelations
we are only possible when testimonies illuminate just beyond the sharp edges of darkness
“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time.
Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
— Don Delillo, Cosmopolis
the light, not yet warm, opens our days
we commit to memory that hope is best performed as a cognitive process
and remember: stars align themselves through proximity and gravitational pull
collapsing distances to violent midwinter visions
questions seep: how did I not know I was in danger
violations stacked delicate // soft brushes with unwanted space
this tail of the past curls comfortably around itself
scared animals return home, even if home is unsafe
as time sinks into litanies simple as joy is serious
our narrative clearly has a beginning, middle, and an end
because our holy bodies are sites of quantum consciousness
we swagger in possibility, we pull intuitive threads to unravel
our stories rush towards truth
details sharpened into mouthfeel
violence ritualized as cadence
ancient patterns worn thin like contempt
or: how we are all subject to trafficked ideas
still — even skies can break down, softly
our distance to attention is a deceptive magic
you learn clarity prefers to love with purpose
this seduction a result of (re)producing evocations
curation guards to protect what others bury
a claim to territory disassociated and devoured
persuasion is found wedged within such righteous exclamations
our daily interruptions have turned personal
yes, it is profitable to reproduce moods
softly familiar to the saturation point of haunting
Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light. —Theodore Roethke
these broken pieces are their own ritual
spirals of coping mechanisms
apparitions
***
I’ll give you something to cry about was a challenge, a threat, and a promise.
Your unmasked emotions always carried a visible regret.
These thoughts came through, wide-eyed and unaware of their tardiness.
Flowing the way water finds the least resistance, crooked and illogical.
***
first there were wild-maned horses on frantic wide open horizons
followed by scratched, then abandoned, lottery tickets turned city sidewalk confetti
both are remembered as tender memories so as not to tear open violently
in the same way a new moon rising is full darkness and as obvious
as even the smallest bird creating their own shadows in flight
peach sunrises softly open the day
inside plastic filters our light
outside the wind transfers blessings
we map these mutual relationships
independent to distance or space
interdependent we expand boundaries
may we witness all this effort as inspiration
allowance was silenced after permission
prohibiting an illusion of shared innocence
our girlhood pasts had both ponies and mystery
subjected to believe in gendered tensions
demand a reaction to keep pace with anticipation
as reworked verses are dropped every Sunday
wanting can be better than having – Andy Warhol
so much depends on the sincerity of others
this war on trust
endless
embracing vulnerability
is a future performance
fragile like sugar cubes in a thunderstorm
your social context is showing
sacrifice becomes dramatic interpretation
when binaries are bound in whiteness
a lead
a follow
a gap between
It’s sweet
And it’s sad
And it’s true
– REM, Oh My Heart
waves mimic earth’s rise and fall
a frequency known as home
Here
hills slope at similar angles
nearly invisible expressions
Here
fog settles thick as love
a passive reflection
Here
place contours memories
the body an unreliable narrator
Here
we are
whole
Dystopia in real time is not like the movies. We’ve digested so much spectacular violence we know no tender alternatives. Fighting feels so good. The characters we play on screen form dead weight on the streets and sink us in our bedrooms.
Persistence is extractive.
As surf buries smoothed rock, we turn the calendar page to July. We spread like picnics under cloudless skies. Our flesh a moral document scrolling beyond politicized reach. After all, the bottom line is always evolving.
Sea levels have always been inconsistent.
Ideological battles are taken for granted outside a schema of pursuit. This adoration, a relationship of necessity, remains prone. A curious posture. Abuse is normal. Its purpose is to feel. Subtly is weaponized.
Perceived as commodities, we trade.
Auspicious tensions act as purifiers for taste, a basic sensation. Our judgements psychic protection. Didactic fracturing agitates into frothy comfort. Perceptions gain value for their ahistorical subjectivity.
Aspirational dissent is the chorus and the bridge to —
If we listen carefully, joy is elegance reproducing itself into near future referential fits and starts. Inspiration is a slow bleed. Murmuring into abruptions delightful as salt penetrating unhealed wounds. An intimacy as ancient and poetic as opiates or fire.
I’m here in a room and I have things arranged.
I have them likened to code, so they can often be changed. — Karate, Bass Sounds
I haven’t found the perfect way to describe you
sincerely shouting victories is something else entirely
the sun rose bland and round
that space between sky and water
absorbed all this energy
such openness feels chosen
I taste frustration on your breath
advancing in spirit and stature
aggression is its own logic
he hit you for the same reasons
he hit us: for your own good
a model of volatile benevolence
in political frameworks, the body does betray
waking up becomes a compulsion
reengineering you get what you ask for
I send this postscript as an invitation
We ignore the narrator by only focusing on the frame.
The city moves, bends, and swallows.
An act of congress, a coming together.
He presented himself to me. I kissed, gently,
his upper thigh. Curated outfits, a collection of pants
and blouses, roll past me. Lunches bounce inside bags.
I keep writing to feel around the noise. Reinvested
memories, commitments, and occasional flashes of violence.
Internalized scandals are my own reputation to manage.
The train was crowded. No one could complain
about unwanted touching. I imagined her hand
moving slowly, without detection, up and between
my legs. Her fingers, warm and steady, found
their destination. Leaving behind permanent
invisible notes, secrets scrawled on the inside.
Messages shared as rumors as indisputable
associations like light shining through solid objects.
I want to put you in a light that will hurt your eyes – Polvo, Feather of Forgiveness
He said he was going to take a walk around the block to clear his mind. Stretch his legs. Escape. He never came back. A map of states’s preferences for corn or potato chips forever frozen on his desktop screen.
Battle for references, a retirement to the absence of —
On Wednesday, I was reminded artists should “support each other religiously.” This community-level policy is seductive, whose root is “to lead astray.” Oceans of context transfer nervous energy. Is thinking out loud unprofessional?
Partisan frames explain our borders, infilled voids.
It’s come down to semiotic analysis of utterances. This weekly cathartic release looping endlessly to create a low frequency hiss. A similar process to the way valleys take the weight, form, and shape of foggy mornings or as secure as refuge.
[such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes]
— E.E. Cummings
We’ve come undone, cumulatively, in the same way that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warns. Ruled by misunderstandings, which is to say we are ruled by no one in particular, norms are large-scale projects of self-consciousness. It’s public infrastructure.
The ocean goes nowhere except to meet itself.
A private sensation, a mix of urging and friction.
Days bleed into opinion. It is not enough to simply be.
All this pressure to perform as heaven’s rewards remain on layaway.
I want to be inside that pejorative energy. Transposed survival.
Cut. Then paste. Seasons as witness to predictions that light seeks light.
you got no fear of the underdog / that’s why you will not survive – Spoon, The Underdog
This violence looks good on you. Fitted. Proper. My opinion, of course.
All apologies have been returned to sender. Transparency is seasonal.
No stability is guaranteed. Can we at least agree it is sacred territory?
This is a good-bye letter. My reasons rolling out like smoke from fire.
shifting horizons changes orientations
desire one another to recognition
our cognizant bodies are protective
an arrangement as relational as structure
philosophical longing is its own psychic delta
The earth shook itself awake this morning.
With a low-key grumble and heavy embodied motion
our unnested Russian cat dolls fell, one by one.
The unnerved mountains had no comment.
We took a collective breath as clouds lined up like teeth
and moved gently to memorialize our survival.
As witness to the sublime, we occupied time.
Santayana, the philosopher, said history is nothing but recorded dreams.
The poet Stafford said divine is more of a claim.
Those stanzas are now trending.
There is a way to be in this world and this must be it.
If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions.
— Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
It’s a fact. Cycles sync. It is October, 2016. The word pussy is in our mouths again. Full and heavy bodied, it’s paired with a specific violence as naturalized as an inherited ownership tone. This is the fetishized frequency of law and order.
*** you’ve got to stack it so it’s stable – Low, No Comprende ***
So this is what whiplash from a mass capture of imagination feels like. A forced common image. Pussy, for now, functions as an ironic partisan anchor, while still maintaining its gendered significations.
What is the whole of this historical objectification of our parts? Patriarchal logic argues that this violence of disassociation is necessary and even desired. This detachment is inherent in our economic theories, consumer-based language, and mass-produced representations.
We learn, repeatedly, there are far more serious and urgent issues to concern ourselves with than ritualized gender-based violence. We are dismissed. We are told to question less and obey more.
*** underneath this hood you kiss, I tick like bomb – Perfume Genius, Hood ***
We perform this idealized creed through a perpetual liturgy of demure expressions in a culture that protects mobs of high-volume denials. This contemporary shrill masculinity is socially recycled into discourses that tap into an idolization of individual perspective. For most, this illusion only creates isolation.
Manipulating the dark side of vulnerability isn’t a new strategy to win elections, or maintain control. What feels different this Presidential election cycle is the dredge of cultural material to mine and the hypervoyeurism that has been produced. Public and private boundaries are as unstable as our contemporary understanding of when virtual becomes reality.
As we bare witness to the misogyny that rages beneath all our sacred institutions, may the soundtrack to this ride to November include Magnet by Bikini Kill.
I’m keeping this advice on a loop: I’ve got the love that’s strong and not weak.
experts have named our environment “rape culture”
fueled by an economy that exports & imports incertitude
funny how even the state’s gospel won’t accept no
even with a sovereign request
another way fringed borders bleed reciprocity
thick as oil as war as water
desire can transform anything
corporeal physics as vim and vigor
like soft kisses melting hard intentions
it’s why embodiment alludes enlightenment
& landscapes matter when our eyes close
horizons become their own grounding binary
pressure is a gilded warning signal
jouissance its own casual experience
how deeply our metaphors inform us
as angels, as deviants, as complicit
love is in here somewhere, or should be
Did you know we have started living in isolation to prepare for colonizing Mars?
There is dedicated front cover news space to our collective denial about the basics of life on this planet: water, menstruation, dignity. A particular death-wish resistance to facts because we can’t face our feelings; our responsibility as witness to 24-hour broadcasted cruelty. Gripping so tightly to distance, we can think only about scale not urgency.
The 1960 Valdivia earthquake data reads like an ultrasound of the earth’s surface. What’s at our center?
“An ellipse is richer than a circle. It possesses two centers. It’s a dialogue.” — Louise Bourgeois
Those smallest details of absence and desire go almost unnoticed, felt as impetus. A survivor’s mentality. An orientation to want (hunger) as something outside of you, something to be experienced. Unapologetic formations to desire are apocryphal stories of purpose. They hold between their lines our remaining humanities. Revelation is all around us. A range no longer than a row of buttons.
Andrea Smith’s foreword in Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia states, “a liberatory vision for immigrant rights is one that is based less on pathways to citizenship in a settler state, than on questioning the logics of the settler state itself.” This expansion of decolonization, a revolution to undo “zones of invisibility, exclusion, and death,” requires a radical vision and daily practice of justice. For those of us who are not indigenous to the nations we occupy, liberation is no longer a theoretical space you can opt in and out.
Undoing Border Imperialism is a collective expression of a migrant justice movement grounded in healing justice. Starting from a place of opportunity, “as a prefiguring framework, decolonization grounds us in an understanding that we have already inherited generations of evolving wisdom about living freely and communally” Walia shows us a future few movement theory books dare dream. Through various entry points in the book, which are beautifully supported by poets, philosophers, and activist’s lived experiences, the reader is profoundly transformed.
Undoing is not used haphazardly nor as a metaphor. We are asked to enthusiastically have a decolonized orientation to self and others. The systems few move through with ease are relational, which is political and embodied. Borders are human-made. That’s one clear justification for resisting violence with nonviolent direct action. If one needs a concrete example, follow #NoDAPL.
Chapter 3 entitled Overgrowing Hegemony: Grassroots Theory puts everything into perspective. Consider this your manifesto.
Given all the power-over we have internalized, traumas we have metabolized, and walls and hierarchies we have maintained between one another, it is imperative that we unravel and confront these effects of border imperialism within our movements as we work to dismantle the systems that propagate it.
Name it. Analyze how power functions and distorts. Commit to steering “movement strategies and relations toward collective liberation.” This requires consent, accountability, and communication that is transformative, not transactional.
We all have a role in this vision.
Strategy cannot be applied in a cookie-cutter approach; it requires collective deliberation, trial and error, and reflection. It necessitates a willingness to experiment, and make mistakes, and humility to change our ways.
Syed Khalid Hussan’s epilogue is a reminder that “our actions are just as much visceral as they are analytical, theoretical, or intellectual.” It’s time to declare that we are no longer obligated to be monogamous in identity, story, or victory. However, we are bound to practice compassion, respect, forgiveness, and evolve our ways of being in community with each other. Walia, and the voices she shares this revolution with, moves us beyond those never-ending conversations that center frameworks (talk). A tactic designed to distract and delay justice. This embodied power is found through a decolonizing praxis that honors generational resistance. To deny this is to remain complicit in settler logic.
We can, as Smith so clearly states, dismantle the logic of the settler state. And in its absence, we move freely with self-determination.
We are a cramp nation. Involuntary, restrictive, a tool.
our periods, collectively, are politically vogue
as gender representation reflects without liberation
we process its reclamation as speculative transmissions
even the clouds
and now their patterns
wander lost
the simplest narratives are stored in the bends of our flesh
rancor its own habitual expression, a saturation of cultural static
transfigurations of competitive positivity, a sharing economy
Angela Davis said the political reproduces itself through the personal
how far does your radiance reach?
Have you noticed love is always on sale and violence is on demand?
she dug deep, and still,
my hips held position
walking through clouds of words
hearing only “baby”
performing radical distortion, always inward
personally speaking, “no” is aspirational
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
Lately, this fevered responsibility begs for:
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
She wore tights the color of sun-hidden skin.
I stole touches. Even in stillness, the body has a beat.
Oblivion’s call such a tempting response.
underneath the ocean
a quiet roars
we all have an edge
soft margins with sharp centers
fiercely contoured boundaries
we sanction ourselves
we insist love is provocative
as we make our homes museums
every day and every night a tender eve
books left marked to forever hold place
Let every kiss hit the body / like a season. – Ocean Vuong, A Little Closer to the Edge
we react as resistance
malefic masculinity
we are born again in times of violence
flash moments designed as destiny
patterns worn translucent
soft and hard (but never loose)
when the middle shifts
the center sways
inertia
we both wanted more
so we took it
hands act like scarves
wrapped necks
turned over
for you
face down
filled with your effort
dusty mandarins marked with stranger’s fingerprints
how do you carry your violence?
Look how much you
love me. Little maps.
from Bruises by Leah Horlick
The clouds formed an amphitheater
over a city transformed, a super city.
Its atmosphere thick with performance
and domination within its own limits.
Listen to the bubble pop pop pop.
Queering our gratification
– delayed to a frothy anticipation –
is an economic ritual with historical reputations.
Golden greeds and lusts as deep
as the veins that financed this spectacle.
Ceremonies of repressed aggressions
baptisms unfurling (catch and release)
physical bodies manifesting, hands cupped,
entertainment as reward and pleasure.
A violence that feels good.
we are our own private property – B
The voices most common to me end with the sound of a question.
It’s that curl at the end, a curiosity unspoken.
There’s a particular consciousness when I hear that familial cadence.
Prompts that possess risk and assumed uncertainty.
The sun was an escort that morning.
A morning with purpose and mummified mandarins.
This and other routines becoming orientations –
a private relationship with temporality.
In silence, I see violence.
In breath, I think sex.
In the pornography of my dreams,
you know you can’t fuck me like that
and then act like I’m fragile. That is
a subtlety best reserved for detachment.
Three years ago today, it was a nearly nude fashion show, and four years ago doing my own thing found itself on a “good things” list.
Do you know if the richest cities face west? What if we found settlement in a such a place?
Weeks form around us. Patterned reconciliations, memories of bus rides in other cities, different exchange rates. Those were my hard gained needs.
From your perspective, I cannot exist. Shifting your vengeance, a cruel blindness, that’s the type of aggression I inherited now abandoned for gentle privileges, useless hardwired knowledge, plotted along sensitive geographies. Navigating scripts, a dialect of claimed silences, lulling like waves like violence like survival. We have always carried this resistance, this method of rapture.
“Because there’s 40 different shades of black…” Pavement Elevate Me Later
I promise to hold your gaze, even those that are unwanted.
Or the erotic retelling of my life as told through your eyes.
I.
It is the specifics that matter when we confess. Some may believe that is enough. The confession is the means to the end. But what would happen if we thought of that release as the beginning?
Until that expositional moment, those words, thoughts, opinions are internalized truths that are ours alone to own and to hold. Now they are all of ours to absorb, to manage, to learn from, and to let go to make room for what we do not yet know.
II.
Please forgive me. I did what I was told to do. I was bound to pick up bad habits after all those hours of witnessing evangelizing and attempts at redemption.
I was taught over and over again, no matter what I did, I was never going to be good enough. I was taught my body was not mine and out of my control. I am just now understanding how much obvious violence, subtle and insidious, is needed to give your soul away.
III.
There is a primacy in this ritual of naming, recording, and distilling into something that only I understand. I won’t be so naive to think that a mirror’s only job is to reflect.
IV.
Geographies contain multipliers.
They are containers of dreams,
a space for visions.
It’s where we found and honed our instincts.
“I make certain that my head is connected to my body.” – Minutemen, It’s Expected I’m Gone
At one point in the evening the phrase “prone to invasion” slipped past your lips. It tumbled forward and danced around until I realized it was a reference to Poland, and then it meant something else entirely different. At least that’s the way I remember it. The way my body froze at the gendered implications of such a legacy so ordinary and so common there is no insurance to prevent it from happening. A form of dissipation found the moment when there is nothing to do but take the next breath. That kind of static state is familiar. It was the same sensation as when I recognized the end of the sermon was close because the preacher moved us towards righteousness and away from forgiveness.
In a book that has nothing to do (at least not in an obvious way) with Nietzsche, I learn that he believed “philosophers tend to write their memoirs in their theories.” That feels like a well-known secret, an existential tenet.
That’s probably why I write about light so much. The sharpness of every one of those mornings when I realized I survived. I was alive. My breath my own. And rhythms. The way give and take should be an invitation. And the different shades within sadness. Understanding how much we had to absorb to get to the point of saturation. And the violence around silence.
There’s so much to tell you which is another way to say: vulnerability. Have you thought about how the intimate architecture of being out of body serves a purpose and the faith it takes to manifest this into pleasure? Why failures can quickly become ways to feel safe? I want to ask questions that lead to answers, or at the very least have a chance to form structure to a conversation.
In the end, this is simply a way to theorize this week’s memories into something concrete, into something I want to remember. I want nothing left but the details of how deliberately the sun slipped behind the ocean horizon and how the blue darkness now holds all my wishes.
“I had only one thing to say. I was so terrified of saying it because once I said it, would I still have anything left to say? To have so little to say. To insist on speaking. To create a silence every time we speak. To know all this and do it anyway. This is as close as I can get to saying what I mean.” — Jenny Zhang, Hags
There’s probably a disclaimer in here.
The streets did not scare me.
Every coffee had a spoon.
Museum translations lacked details.
Gold, fine porcelain, silver settings,
swords, myths, transferred power.
Remember intangible moments,
hoard the way light hides shadows.
Repeat until this is a song,
a rhythm that leaves room
for forgiveness. Retracing outlines
of curves and coveting lines
that dead end. We’ve sold out
of what’s needed
to mend broken hearts.
Violence supplying demand,
the brutality unavoidable.
Endless summers folding
into winter’s waves. Wishing to
stop long enough to synch breath.
a psychology of place
the most traditional pride we have
imagine policies centered within body sovereignty
what we desire is liberation
battles rage at the community level
common ground can be found between neighbors
structural violence is a domestic issue
what we desire is love
take my hand
it will tell you
everything you want to know
what we desire is more
If I told you there are members of our society
who want to regulate menstruation,
will you finally see their strategies of brutality?
Hot spring nights remind me of
places where towns have edges.
All of us carry desire and violence.
Eyes like mouths, wanting:
dirty pillows, tight skirts, faceless crowds;
negatives transformed into positives.
We joke about taking it all the way as the planets revolve around us. Facing one another, like borders, we exchange memories as cash and carry each others extremes to calibrate our balances.
In What Is Found There, Adrienne Rich notes that the core of metaphors are “resemblance in difference.” And Gloria Anzaldua said, “The resistance to change in a person is in direct proportion to the number of dead metaphors that person carries.” There is much to explore within these spaces of similarity and syncretistic juxtapositions. Metaphors are essential ingredients, catalysts really, that shape how we will tell others what we see.
Navigating aspects of a culture, one that feels more about reading and performing than being, only partially explains my reoccurring dreams of stairs. Traveling east to the prairie to fulfill a mission that will close a chapter of home that has few memories that aren’t seeped in melancholic filters may be another immediate interpretation. It’s equally likely, and as obvious, this vision is based on that lost time in Chicago. The recalled memory is only violent sound: bones on concrete.
All these core stories want to be told.
When the door closes, I bargain for my safety.
Have you noticed that the air smells sweet with rotting leaves?
I think constantly about familiar tensions:
sunny winter blue skies.
I am dreaming in violence again.
The holidays are nearing.
I want to only read radical things:
text
images
selves
