big beau and beautiful; sip spoonfuls of April air—the feral
perfume
Razzle dazzle and jazz cigarettes in the June
Jordan Almond afternoon
It’s spring!
I’m tired of being
grave
Track 4: “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt-N-Pepa. Except change the lyrics to, “Let’s talk about death baby.” Underscore that you have to sing that lyric three times in succession, to underlie that even in the winkie-frownie up-and-down season of spring, there is some consistency.
What a better time than in the face
of spring and the spring
ephemerals—a bloom
so
short
it puts the fleet in “fleeting feeling”
which, okay,
fleet is on sale for like 1.99 at Walgreens. Spring
cleaning, and
Track 5: “Gettin’ It” by Too $hort. Mostly that part abt get it while the gettin’ is good. Cos you know why? Everyone could! You should be too! “Pluck” is a perfectly springy word to use here. Vigor is the art he argues for.
So much butter. Butter, butter, butter, butter, rockin everywhere am I rite?
One stick, two stick, red stick, blue stick. I thought maybe half a stick? No, it’s half a stick for the sausages, but a whole one for the tomato sauce. Butter the bread, get yr sea salt rocks off. The water shd taste Atlantic. Monica’s kid practically revs himself into the tabletop behind us in her Albany Park apartment with Popeyes “come hither” musk wafting in through the open window. Says she didn’t know how to cook before she got married, that trying new dishes was a way she and her husband bonded. Keeping kids alive is some shit, I think while remembering when we’d duct tape 40s to our palms in college.
The garlic the green
pepper the onion—which! I just learned how to cut: Claw hands. Cracked my first egg ever for a cooking show in Berkeley where I made a spaghetti and chard frittata to serve a boy the morning after we’ve presumably played dick-butt. The basics are my revelation. The andouille sausage, the bacon
tips, the ham hock, the scallions, the smoked
paprika bubble bubble’s the gumbo in Roy’s Concordia apartment by the bakery where the dad, just after a run, bought me a coffee while I was in line and slipped me his number.
The heat. The bubble bubble infuses Get ready
for a dead horse:
Infuse: cause to penetrate. To introduce as if by pouring. Instill. To imbue or inspire. To steep or soak (leaves, bark, root, etc.) in liquid so as to extract the soluble properties or ingredients. Late Middle English past participle of infundere, to pour into. In: verb formative prefix. Used to indicate inclusion. Fuse: tube, cord, or the like filled or saturated with combustible matter, for igniting an explosive. To melt under heat caused by excess current, thereby opening the circuit. To combine or blend by melting together. To become united or blended. From the Latin fūsus—melted, poured, cast. As in the walls are high
and hard to climb until the temp turns up
and we’re flush with each other As far as I’m concerned
when it gets this hot, pant legs and sleeves are a hate
crime
I’m almost always talking to someone but almost never seeing anyone, I say as me n Leo pass through the Chelsea Market Passage and our voices bounce around the thrum of the crowd shuffling about us now. Our passage between and through the gently stalling masses like an obstacle course of bodies. I mean the last time I really dated someone was . . . I look up at him while trailing off, which is becoming a pebble feature of our patter. Anyway, the wedding looked gorgeous, from what I saw on Insta, I say like a Hawaiian shirt in the winter: not quite believable but go off. He shakes his head and eyes into me like shards of glass. That’s not what you really think. Stalled behind a double-wide stroller I stop and turn to him. Leo, for the love of god you had flip-flops made for the guests with both yr freaking initials on them. I was praying that I would choke to death on my own vomit so I would never have to see it again. Leo grins wide as the High Line. How long are you in town for?
If it was going to happen
it
would have happened by now right? So many ways
extraterrestrial love I mean life DOESN’T exist The unstable
axial tilt
of Mars probs why the atmosphere decayed What if, looking
into the bastion of other worlds Kepler and TESS and SETI and METI
tinkering roving for new
Earths to exploit
Kepler 438b its orbit hospitable for liquid
water, comfortable range of temperatures OH BUT WAIT—
its host star is faaaaar too temperamental, sends out regular flares
of overwhelming radiation. Life unlikely. Next planet. Organic
compounds passing like ships in cold, dark methane skies
What if this is the only outpost of life? Eukaryote precarity. So what was I saying
again? Oh yes—everything is always hungry
for something—pork, mulch, money, money, money, biiiinch
Dear reader,
can you hear the moaning
plane overhead?
Feel the beating heat
on yr t-
zone? The sizzle of foam
on the water?
Poems light up corridors of the mind, like food.
I grew up on a food
desert, a speck
of dust on the map of the United
States—an Indian reservation east of San Diego in a valley surrounded
by mountains that slice thru the clouds like a loaf
where the average age of death is 40.7 years old.
I am 34.
I live in the busiest city in America.
I am about to eat an orange.
Every feed owes itself to death. Poetry is feed
to the horses within me.
[in three voices, like a braid: Gansevoort Woodland 2]
shadbushes, Amelanchier; am-meh-LANG-kee-er
Japanese clethra, Clethra barbinervis; KLETH-ruh bar-bin-ER-vis
Dawn viburnum, Viburnum × bodnantense; vi-BER-num bod-nant-EN-see
The ancient Egyptians used to worship cats.
And now they’re dead.
Autumn moor grass, Sesleria autumnalis; sess-LAIR-ee-ah ot-um-NAL-iss
purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea; moh-LIN-ee-ah ser-OO-lee-ah
Grace smokebush, Cotinus coggygria; koe-TYE-nus kog-GIG-ree-uh
North American native smokebush, Cotinus obovatus; koe-TYE-nus ob-oh-VAY-tus
Me n Wilkes skank down Essex on our way to the sushi place that has the happy hour where you can get a roll for two dollars and they always play mid-90s R&B and oftentimes in the middle of the meal we gotta stop everything we’re doing and just listen to the song not looking at each other or anyone.
Me: Not to be a Doubting Thomas but I don’t think there’s a Paradox at all. There’s no evidence of alien civilizations because there aren’t any others. Maybe life is just extremely rare.
Wilkes: If it’s an infinite universe, how likely is it that this is the only planet that can sustain life?
Me: So it’s just probability that keeps you believing.
Wilkes: Let’s just say that the nature of intelligent civilization, one that’s been around a lot longer than us, one that’s smart enough to be aware of us, let’s give them some credit. If we’re not detecting them it’s because they don’t want to be detected.
Me: Sure but no matter where you go, elements are all the same. Gold and helium and shit. Space is infinite but resources aren’t. In a world this rich in resources, they would be farming the fuck out of us right now.
Wilkes: The way we’re doing things, we can’t last much longer as it is. Everyone kind of knows that. Every morning I take a shower I wonder what it’s going to be like when bathin
g is a luxury, the way it is for so many other people in the world. If they are older than us, they would have had to figure out some other way of being. They would have to be better than us, or perish.
Me: It sounds like you’re saying civilization isn’t inherently imperial.
Wilkes: Maybe
Me: Are you . . . an optimist?
Wilkes: So we’re just throwing around the “O” word now, willy-nilly?
Enough with your sailor talk!
Dear Leo,
I mean Reader,
I will always remember You
I mean Leo
on the drive
to Seattle, platelets
in the artery of the 5 shunting
SACRAMENTO PROTESTS CONTINUE AMID POLICE SHOOTING DEATH
into the city’s heart
bc usually I take the bust
I mean bus from Portland
bc of course I’m usually by myself
and the bust
meanders off the freeway and comes
in on the sneak
dropping me in the international district
like a side piece
You showed me a new edifice of the city, a new perspective that taught me to remember to breathe with every humor of my body. Honestly, who tf keeps inviting pesto basil to this party, I say into my tomato mozz breakfast sandwich that I only bought because I needed to eat something before drinking my green tea so I wouldn’t vom in the airplane bathroom aGAIN. Which crook cook said it was okay to put balsamic roasted red peppers and sun dried tomatoes in EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. SANDWICH.
This is the last soupy sentiment abt boys I’ll ever lip-smack into a tin cup tethered to yr teenage bedroom
You have an impulse
says Dr. John. It’s not about forcing yrself to turn the impulse off. You can indulge, you can not indulge. Just be curious. Look at it. You’ve been a journalist. Ask it who where what why and how Motherfucker
Plants have the most complicated biochemistry in nature—it’s not explicit, their influence, but powerful as passive aggression. Family
like a forest, like home it grows
wherever I go. Trees of forests of families gabbing at the root. Wild tobacco developing nicotine as a toxin to shoo away insects who feed on the leaves.
I’m hungry.
There, I said it.
I’m not taking it
back
I guess time really has passed
even tho now it feels like gurgling reedy rainbow
sprinkles I remember being a common teen
age anorexic in the throws I mean
throes of whittling myself invincible I mean
invisible and saying “I’m Hungry”
was like saying “Kill Me Slowly With Blunt
Force Trauma You Fucking Dog
Bitch”
and while I’ve smoothed closer
and closer
to saying that word and in fact all
words and in fact it turns out
I have a really loud
ass
face
underneath the mirepoix I mean three sisters
of self-censorship and x-treme self
doubt and chopped onions
Is it revolutionary, asserting the desire to continue? Well,
it certainly is new
Consume to continue
Decisive knife
Legal Weed
Saturated natural light
Morning porny wood
Is hunger something
I shd take care of with food?
Okay.
Yes.
Got it. Dear reader, let’s make a culture!
Let’s make a dough. Like anyone whose culture has been scrubbed
from history, you can scrub my apple crumble
But you can never scrub my hunger
Making culture is me exposing my will to live. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. Ppl think I’m a nihilist but I haven’t thought abt burning it all down for like 20 minutes now. I mean really, how can you be anything but a nihilist when you’ve accidentally clicked on a link to a anal prolapse vid Really? As a person seated in shame yr about to shame?
Let’s get bubbling
Let’s get wet
Let’s bold the buttock loaves @ Kristina’s Bernal Heights abode
Yes! I have become the kind of person who says “buttocks” instead of booty cheeks or ass clappers or pound cakes It’s a new dawn it’s a new day
The culture teems. I guess we shd discuss the matter of our trade-off. Ask me a question, any question that spreads the oil along yr non-stick head
No, not that one.
Not that one either.
Jesus, yr really bad at this.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Oh no, that one is beautiful, thank you love :-)
Yes I suppose I still feel in my ankle and wrist chakras
the small sand weights I wd wear to weigh-ins at the NDN clinic to
make sure I didn’t sliver slip lower on the scale and so my mom wd
feel some stability
during the tail end of their marriage
when the sun set on our family
She sends me lists of memories
from the vagaries of her wind
Flowering moments
Mom is old, she says over text every other
day
I want someone to keep these memories after me
1985, Tekakwitha Conference in Syracuse, New York. Mohawk nation in Kahnawake, Quebec.
Colors are innervated
daubed by millennia of associations and projective identifications
Grey is soft, limitless gush Canopy-eye
nose picker underwear riding up
1967
The year before the Olympics I remember
dropping
down
from Toluca into Mexico City
at
night
on the back of a milk
truck, glittering bowl of gems that was the skyline
The city gushed around us in constant
motion
Brash drivers thrashed the narrow streets, wound the roundabouts, arteries
with platelets of people
from all over the world
The stately
buildings and Chapultepec Park
The hamburguesa restaurant for American touristas
We laugh.
With all the wonderful food in Mexico City,
why?
I guess everyone likes a taste of home A tint
of Adrienne Rich’s
Dream of a Common Language
[in three voices, like a braid: Hudson River Overlook]
Sumacs, Rhus typhina, roos ti-FEE-na
Rhus glabra; roos GLAY-bra
mountain mint, Pycnanthemum muticum; pic-NAN-the-mum mew-tee-CUM
Joe-Pye-weed, Eupatorium; yew-pah-TOR-ee-um
blazing star, Liatris; LYE-ah-tris
Rich and Willie and Chase twalk
about the Proud Boys
stalking up Cap Hill 70 strong twice
the size
they were last year
and I can only think how much smaller the year before that or maybe
not smaller but so much less brazen before the terracotta slob slithered
their truth
“Not to fight” Chase says intones
they’re mostly non-violent frat
boys just trying to
disrupt
the
community
and I feel like a back/slash runneth thru me Blood leaking from uncooked meat
Not like Palestine-protest-Jerusalem-embassy massacre
or in Pakistan where the journalists “disappeared”
or Mogadishu bustling city-center bombs or ICE
losing thousands of migrant kids at every
turn targeting target
rash explosion of ticks nearing Lyme se
ason again targeting churches
Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Cities
and the bombs
and the bombs
and the bombs
fly over state drones fly over other countries
and the lol “president”
says “we” “tamed” “the” “continent”
and “we” “aren’t” “apologizing”
“for” “America”
and murdered and missing indigenous women
never
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
ever
get an article a shout-out or a headline
but that white crisis actor lady who advocates for police brutality got water splashed
in her face at a brunch spot Or the mouthpiece to the regime getting denied service at a Red Hen or staffers “bummed out” at their treatment in public
—to outcry—
and it’s like idk
if I’m ever here wtf
Reconcile:
to cause
a person
to accept or to be resigned to something not desired
Mom does not want to be hooked up to no machines she texts
day after Auntie passes That’s not prolonging life that’s extending death
To win over
to friendliness; cause to be amicable.
We’re on the benches. I suggested tea. I blow on mine as the swoopy
bangs blow about his face in the golden light. I have a real
bed now, not that stupid box spring Off-brand foam mattress
I bought in installments from Overstock with a gel
topper to whisk away the heat I trail
off into my matcha green before slicking my eyes back up to Leo’s Sorry didn’t mean for that to sound like an invitation. God, the first thing out of my mouth is about my bed. I’m not asking you to get in it, I mean sorry but I think we’ve both moved on lol I didn’t want to, it’s just . . .
. . . after that last fight, I kept thinking about what you said, about how I just had a box spring on the floor. I felt ashamed like so immature you know? I’ve been trying ever since to grow up. Sometimes it feels like I am. But sometimes it feels like it’s everyone else around me growing up, and I’m just getting older.