The Poem I Just Wrote
by Joy Harjo
The poem I just wrote is not real.
And neither is the black horse
who is grazing on my belly.
And neither are the ghosts
of old lovers who smile at me
from the jukebox.
Category Archives: lit
MOIST MIND
Is technoetic multiconsciousness
is where dry pixels and wet molecules converge
is digitally dry, biologically wet, and spiritually numinous
combines Virtual Reality with Vegetal Reality
comprises bits, atoms, neurons, and genes
Is interactive and psychoactive
embraces digital identity and biological being
erodes the boundary between hardware and wetware
is tele-biotic, neuro-constructive, nano-robotic
is where engineering embraces ontology
Is bio-telematic and psi-bernetic
is at the edge of the Net
– Roy Ascott
Kiss: Fly: Air: Belt Text from Monologue by Kelly Chen
It is all the time everywhere. The fitness gram pacer test is a multistage aerobic capacity test. The following morning I was waiting for a call. I think I am just a little exhausted right now. I think I am a little overwhelmed by you right now. Realize, real eyes, real lies. Concrete jungle, wet dream, tomato. What people think is hard on violin versus what is really hard in real life. We talk like nothing had happened. It is how I remember it. The house with the best halloween
decorations now has a blue lives matter flag. You asked me about my family.
You asked me about my friends. You asked me how I am.
The sun comes to the world where the place is Sheepshead. The sun comes to me where the place is Sheepshead and melts everything in plain sight. I don’t know where the buildings are. I don’t know how that song goes. I am not sure if I remember liking this at all.
How can you doubt me when I have the lines in the center of my hands? What do you do when memory takes on no shape?
There are no details to confuse – like who and why, or when and where. I opened a video on the house computer and the image was obscured by a finger. Just girly things. Does my voice sound better when you can’t recognize it? Memory foam and memory card games and muscle
memory. I am trying my best to be better than that.
I still hold my toes when I am cold and I am doing less and less. There’s a photo of you that’s old and torn where I gave someone the wrong directions. You asked if I was trying to be impossible. You asked if I liked clean air and a life without buildings. You asked if I would remember if it came to pick me up again. You asked about being a speculative being.
How could you forget my birthday? How did you forget my birthday? I look forward to seeing you and letting you walk around my mind. I look forward to seeing you And? Letting you litter in my mind.
Look at the cars coming. Good morning. Look at the trees and clouds. Good morning. Look at the birds leaving. Good morning. Look at my empty body. Look at the things I am avoiding. Look at the snow. You remembered every snow and told me about them. Look at the snow. Good morning. I heard you like it here but probably not as much as I do. I am seeing the rectangle. I am a rectangle, then televangelism, then a mansion, then a parade.
The dust was dancing and the sky was still. When it happened, I was singing and you were sleeping.
They found me brilliant and wanted nothing to do with me. I try not to complicate it. I was picked up from my house all summer by people. Then I got hit by a car in somerville. I walked all over the place, everything was concrete and the ceilings were high. Everything was covered in aerosol sunscreen. I had a dream that my hair grew long enough that I could tie it back. My mom texted me a picture of her lunch from community college that said “pizza day”. I wonder if she misses mountains. I grew a lot of weed, then made my bed. I rode my bike and didn’t do much else.
Clouds and chemtrails are inseparable. A little patch of light comes through and knocks everything I know over. I like emails, and their parameters. I like caterpillars and their limits. I like that things don’t have to effectively be like anything else. We had a school desk on our porch in brooklyn. My dad ate cold cuts there and I rode my bike up and down the street. I had just learned about block parties and we were playing a game where we guessed the song that was playing. I did not know Rihanna. I said anything, and won a balloon dog. I wonder what my
physical counterpart is.
The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.
-Mark Fisher
“Sometimes I call myself trans, and I think in my head, like transit. I’m trans not because of where I might end up one day but because I am going somewhere, away. More than I am a woman, I am not a man…”
To Recuperate Our Cosmic Inheritance
I don’t want to be another silent casualty of time.
This body, floating like a sheet in the wind
filling out baggy clothes but underneath empty.
Invoked in a cloak of your own mystery.
Plasticine internecine creeping like hemlock leaves.
Rain catcher redundancy
rots the only, call of the lonely
slaughter in the stony sky.
Sword stuck in the sheath.
Silver liquid drumming mercury.
I need the sound of un-sheath,
the slickness of metal unbecoming.
And so,
Seized by the heat of the meteor
that was your hand
that held
the heat.
I’d do anything to forget.
I’d do anything to remember
it clearly now.
And in the wake of constant crisis
it is always surprising how much beauty this world holds
and how such a small body can hold too so much sorrow.
How much rain must I borrow?
Thibault was born at the foot of a sacred mountain
It’s rock blanket caressed by the sun and the fairies
He had chosen to grow a fruit there
A fruit with the taste of life
Golden color
He drank the juice of his childhood
In a bosom swollen with the breath of summer
His youth, his laughter resounded on the frozen mountains
He had chosen to grow a fruit
A fruit with the taste of life
Golden color
On his twentieth birthday he took shovels and picks and dug the earth
It was to plant a tree
Flow sap, take life!
I cling to the roots
My whole being clings to it
Pull (ah!) your branches into the air
He let his moods split with the winds
Shining among the gods
Then came the day when his children spoke of an old man’s home
He had chosen to grow a fruit there
A fruit with the taste of life
Golden color
All alone without disturbing anyone preparing his departure
It was to go to a gray city that he left its ramparts
But before taking the road he thought of the tree
His tree had been nourished like him
by the smell of snow, of air, of charms
He had chosen to grow a fruit
A fruit with the taste of life
Golden color
At the foot of the tree he lay down and watched the squirrel dance
Slowly he passed away, his heart warm
He will not be alone
The Leash by Ada Limón
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.