The Brooklyn Rail

AND, TO EXIST IS

what it has always been: a woman lounging on a velvet chaise or a woman
doing someone else’s laundry [figuration], a boy with a bag, etc. America
cannot distinguish certain urgencies from faith. Drones overhead dumping
something into someone. How to enter belief? [A quest] [A dissident reac-
tion] I have said “everyone,” but I meant “a few.” I have said “chaos”
but I meant “catastrophe.” The whole nature of loving another person
I have said “everything,” but really, the poem is meant to register the
particulars: these pants from Anthropologie like black balloons. There’s
a black man on my street walking with a bat and safety goggles, his little
white poodle trailing behind him wearing a sweater. The first touch in a
dark hallway, just the right pressure, a voluptuous sinking. Narrative,
right out the window if there could be a window.

INSISTENCE ON BEING

Precarity as a form of divination. Looking into each
light form and breaking as old as the human body—its
devastating fragility. Only the mother knew the sclerotic
neck bone calling it a fat mole. The gumption of that
slang revealed itself in a melancholic gaze. Comfort
and ease of hospital gown. Paper clothing. I did not
touch. I wondered about proximity as potential touch.
My own fixation on narrowing the gendered body. I
wanted the skin right above the skeletal frame. We
can call it: free movement in concert with conquest.
The old ways.

EXCERPTS FROM THE POEM INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS

“Lover” is incorrect to describe the lover. No English
words for the labors of ████████.

The entanglement of loverness meant that when the
world disappeared, we could not feel our subjugation.
Cradled by the beloved. Enveloped, however temporar-
ily, in the confines of bloom, the consumption of the
ego. We swagger forth into our gendered selves along-
side American rivers. My cap tilted sideways. Resolu-
tion stands like a remnant. Call forth the tatters of any
lover correspondence and dip into its performance. I’m
not dying anymore, you whisper into the lovers’ ears.
In the henceforth, what remains is tumbleweed lining
the throat. It swells, heartbeat in ears disintegrates all
knowledge. Dear lover, you know I lie.

I want a life of deep connection, I said to the lover.
These things, why say them? I do not “have” this lover
anymore possessed as I am by connection and loving.
Want to have. Want to tuck away under my smelly
arm pit. Want then to release into the world like a
wounded bat I healed. I thought that lovers were a
resemblance for my use, speaking of service. The day
is long. Beautiful use is a lover who waits naked for
hours self-bound. She called me “fragile” and then a
“superhero.”