Notation

The state decenters the idea of community, while simultaneously displacing the self from the body. I compare my inability to manufacture sustainability in my own life as a reason why I can’t possibly help anyone else. Education is often structured to erode the capacity to imagine. I could not see myself past twenty-two when growing up. My dreams of a future, most often were me breathing in other timelines, as other people, most often still in alternative phases of death. We are often taught that there is one correct answer. One means to survive successfully here. Imagination becomes sequestered to the artistic or to “mentally afflicted” projections. My first dream of love ends with a shot through my skull. I don’t often have time to cry, so sometimes I wake with tears and the sunlight. Work and consciousness interrupts the body trying to grieve. By reducing concepts of family to nuclear units, feelings of isolation tend to emerge as your home life becomes the act of a square peg trying to fit into triangle shaped slots. Here the state refuses to help you sustain yourself, your family might fail to help you sustain yourself, most often you must begin to relate to yourself as capital. What most usable shape can someone afford to contort themselves into? This requires either dulling the tongue (the way it discerns flavor, the bitterness from the rot) or by removing pieces of it to garble your ability to speak clearly. Here I often consider how we are taught to say yes first, instead of communicating how we are feeling. Here I mean how the body responds to commands or outside instruction. Here, through a misuse of the tongue and meaning, we are taught to correct ourselves or to act correctly. Through self correction, the body begins to continuously doubt its capacity and ability. The nation formulates normal to disorient the body, causing the self to feel wrong. Through wrongness, I find it hard to either dream or to relate. So I often might say I don’t know what to do or this is overwhelming. By deemphasizing the imagination, the state ensures we are in a constant state of grief, most often a state of denial. I don’t deserve it. I'm not good enough. I am not myself even when looking at the mirror. As a displaced image, I lose sight of anyone else, therefore reinforcing the boundary between myself and my neighbor. I reinforce the individualism while simultaneously being unable to imagine me as myself or a time outside of this time or a future together, let alone imagine a future alone.

Kaleidoscope

America is a mouse trap and I keep mistaking money for cheese.

I fell asleep midday full of paper, because I forgot that fruit could come from trees

Someone takes equity with their tongue and cuts

me while I try to dream of rest.

I wake up in a sea of anemones and blood.

The bees have all died out twenty years ago.

The young woman, who develops a way to turn tears into bullets,

fails to develop a tool to make our sweat into honey.

In school, they teach us how to use our hands as fertilizers

to replace the hummingbirds, whose bones now sing white in the relenting heat.

I harvest my hair to braid ropes and caskets.

The river bed remains dry. Fish bones flicker grief.

I forget where I left my body.

I see the mirage as a wave before it slaps me awake.

The sewers are the only source of water now that all the wells are empty.

I mimic apology by opening my legs in the sand.

Far off, a star falls like nuclear fission or memory or ache.

Before a nation, America is the gravesite.

I hear on the news that despite the pollution

People are living longer, despite being less of themselves.

My necks twist into the shape of a parched tongue.

I try to drink my own saliva, if my body would let me in on its thirst.

Winter is a myth my grandmother fed to me with her nails.

I try to arrange myself as a rest stop for a future beyond this.

I phrase the word love with my remaining teeth.

I find my body near a cliff mimicking a butterfly long extinct.

I wake up again, this time

in a state of drowning I mistake as relief.

Refractions

Do you remember the smell

of smoke and sweet flower

as a woman set fire to her lover’s car

on the road

next to a wall of jasmine,

the new moon invisible amidst the stars,

the sound of water against the tub,

the feeling of running but never getting anywhere,

the tangerine way your heart hurt when you saw the news

Whenever you saw the news,

When you saw that gender revealed the fire?

Do you remember when jasmine

divides the woman,

set on fire

her love, smoke,

the feeling sound

running everywhere

bursting tangerine,

the Sun engendering haze,

god meandering the cheek,

saltwater traveling down chin,

Searching for heavens, my God?

Does memory remember time wrapping like jasmine vines across the throat,

the lover trying to drive home through the smoke,

road edges invisible, water

fall a divide between eye and horizon,

the tears resting like stars against the windshield

conjuring memory thighs

tasting like tangerine and ache,

wetness and wailing,

consumption and consummation,

God searching for the memory of you,

God searching for you,

God searching?

Do you remember when God went searching for you,

raised the sun from the sea,

reversed time,

tried to find your bones before ash,

before the fire,

God’s grief,

the smoke,

this tangerine ache,

the sweetness of water

showering the tongue,

the woman

spinning

grace into

your hair,

the pang

crooked

across the jasmine, revealing

the stars,

the tub,

the memory?

Object

The tension between being an offering and being a mirror.

To be feast or glass.

The tension of where to begin.

The poem as not reflection, but flesh.

The poem’s pulse, its reverberations.

The tongue. The mouth.

Spittle and the force of its annunciation.

The building of affirmative definite articles that make the body,

The poem’s body, penetrable.

Signify tension between the tongue, the mouth, the wet echo

against the air, its effect.

The crest, the feeling of fullness.

The tension of feeling full.

A dream.

Counter to muscle memory, counter to the impact.

Intertwined with the body, the narrative voice, the twin lineage between.

A dream unfastening the neck.

The gap. The mouth slack. The coin shaped sensation,

The site of trauma and the site of healing.

The two faces. The line between the body and another body,

a dream.

Green swims through the poem,

a dappled light.

Sunshine, oxygen blush, leaves.

A living because it only knows how to live.

This water and this earth unfixed.

A lack of limit and conjecture,

A life undefined. A tension between wanting and flesh.

A tension between a body instead of offering or mirror.

A poem.

A dream.

A feeling.