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.
