The Brooklyn Rail

in our relationship,
i am the object / you are the subject

in our relationship,
i am the subject / you are the object

in our relationship,
i am the object / you are the subject

in our relationship,
i am the subject / you are the object¹

Partly colored as near white.² given over to an imaginary of interim, continuum, transition, progression. even as that which is lost in this extraction returns inexorably as the critical and aesthetic reserve of an irrecoverable revenance

of appeal
testament to

attune
and fracas of recognition

proportion
ablution

bleed maintenance at
the form would cut

relegation
monitor out in that space

garment
motif

The personification of what is borrowed by borrowed institutionality is a problem for personhood.³ this middle man is not a man. their minority not a quotient but a derivation of scalar incursion. a recursive measure drawing interiority out into its constitutive opening, where we observe the failure of public impressment to privatize an unseemly remainder

of the leased
poured

apses
shoaled to that

lacquer
of which one

timely stitch
grieves

the tide would seethe to

Disavowal’s sadder accompanist. identification’s refuse faded into the ground as its surface, shamed by admission and introjection. wan melancholy which will be mistaken for a bad desire for human exception, for whiteness, rather than its erratic, erotic discomplexion.⁴ the incorporation of loss, mouth to mouth. a literalization too transparent to perform. a depression in the language of representation, the glass in the glass closet of formal equivalence. call it abstract

of
attenuation

loss free again the reverb
of an attempt

i gather about me
like a ditch or tarmac

flagrant
beautifully painted out

like a colander
for these saps

these concepts
a bellows

But what language of surface and depth adequately expresses the incorporating effects of melancholy?⁵ a vision in perpetual view of development gives the lie to the implementation of speaking

from the inside.       white.      inside white.
white noise.       white wind.      snow.      shades.⁶

Endnotes

1. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, audience / distant relative (1977)
2. Leslie Bow, Partly Colored (2010)
3. Frank Wilderson, Black Red and White (2010)
4. Ann Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (2001)
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
6. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, EXILÉE (1980)