Author: Lorraine Graham

I am elated because spring, because love, because good God my friends

are amazing. Creativity and the shape that contains it, the way that distance

exacerbates insecurity and how a look, not even a touch, can help attend

to the tender details, a preference for in-person interaction, an insistence

on bodies as the shape of creativity, on bodies as bodies. I want you, it’s simple,

and all these flowers and all this work just makes it worse, more salient, 

i.e. better. I like the sharp cut of desire as much as the soft unfolding, the ample

radiating outward of alient energy, gallant passes at some kind of brilliant

unfolding into all that we are in the moment. And this one, too. I worry

that you are too overwhelmed to connect with me. With work, babies,

and the basic challenge of leaving the house each morning. Surely my worldly

concerns concern you equally, how the crazy phases of life and their rhythmic

changes pulse with possibility. You are in over your head with me. Anyone 

would be. Is. Except Jessica, maybe. I’m in over my head with myself.

It’s still spring, but now it’s Monday and I am quite undone by the fleeting

nature of both feelings and existence. Instead of elation, anxiety. Chaff at

the edges of what little attention I have–attention as a field that should be

sorted, but isn’t, anxiety as a kind of energetically thwarted love that stubbornly

refuses to leave the solar plexus. “I’m going to put my feet in the toilet,” says

Desmond, fully serious, slowly walking up the stairs, then suddenly declaring

it a joke. But is it? I go upstairs to check, just in case. I love my friends. 

Desmond sits on top of me so it’s pretty much impossible to type, and I spend

the next five minutes telling him to get off of me. When I get to this line,

it’s tomorrow, and I extend my emotions once again, pretending I’m in control 

of my love and creativity, my ability to not obsess over whether or not my lover 

will message me back, whether they’ll tell me their dreams or tell me they’re 

tired, hopefully both, but however it goes, I’m gone. Obsessing about however

it felt to do this and that and that and that. I prepare for tomorrow’s workday

and sigh. Trevor says he likes it when I sigh as I write poems. There’s a romance

to the moment that I believe in but don’t feel, not right now, even though it’s still

spring, and my friends are still amazing. I’m still hanging on your every word,

sweet one, and the semblance of something between us, among humans, among

feelings, exhausted by my own elation and swoon and by the basics of the day,

now several days, of trying to write this poem while mostly parenting and working. 

My legs ache from hauling boxes up and down the steps to my new studio, disarray

a necessary precursor to order, all the weird and necessary objects lurking in boxes,

phrases lurking in emails. Why don’t you watch my instagram stories? They are 

for you, in part, for all of you. For excessively late nights and early mornings,

the challenge of getting the grown ups and the babies out of the house at the same

time. I am aware of my indiscretions, have declared them to the proper authorities,

know that all these yearnings are ridiculous. There’s some kind of luchador horror

film on at the bar and I’m remembering a particular burrito place in San Diego,

site of many now-distant loves that I don’t want to wait another decade to see again,

the hollowness of middle age followed by overwhelming abundance. Behold, 

all my loves! Ill advised and otherwise, marked and unmarked. Have you ever

been to Sky Zone? I want to dive into that pool of styrofoam with you and survive.

How to write when completely distracted, burned out, the figure of time

as a perpetually lovestruck asshole who is largely unwilling to get shit

done yet carries on anyway, like the good time they are, begrimed with

experience and wonder that just won’t quit. I get it, you’re not wondering

how to approach the situation so much as wishing the situation didn’t exist.

I’m glad for existence, though, enough to feel like regret is still worth it,

still worth the weird energy that sparks between humans. I missed you,

friend, and panicked a little when I saw you again, something unearthed

from whichever part of my body stores lust and ambiguity, the part of

my soul that hovers just above myself and wonders what the hell I’m doing.

I missed you, too, city, in your springtime lushnesses and hive-causing pollen

wafting from the branches above, a dove cooing on my windowsill. I pitch

woo easily, especially while sneezing in spring, tits up, shoulders back as I 

walk into the gallery, office, studio, bar to meet my friends, my beloveds,

all in my feelings, the day stacked with time (that asshole), as I stand by

hoping you’ll message me something witty instead of something polite

or something about what groceries we need, what becomes of us when we

work and parent only. But my desires are all mixed up. Exactly mixed up

in the right way. Every month I wonder what this month is. So what is April?

Just when we think we know the time it changes. They change, and whatever

wooing strategy long since messed up for good by what I’ve been told is an

intimidating enthusiasm. That you should be so lucky to have this poet’s 

attention, and this poem’s attention, too. All the better to woo you with, syntax

undone and reformulated into something more interesting than our texts, eros is

waiting and they are both impatient but in it for the long game. When I’m 60,

70, 80, 90–you just wait, eros. I mean don’t wait. But also, wait! I do not miss

the particular way I was lost in my youth, but I do miss the way I could conduct

a campaign of soft attention or enter into a minor flirtation. I promise you,

I am a sincere man, woman, whatever. There are no palm trees where I come

from, and I am from no where, or else from an obscure province, one you’ve

been to on summer vacation if you’re kind of artsy. I become undone, thinking

of you. No seriously. The one you choose is not always the one you love, but I 

don’t have that problem. I always choose the one I love for my sweet attention

and major flirtations and unexpected trajectories of encounter, even though 

encounters are rarely unexpected and usually overdetermined. I compose with

divided intention. The grasses on our lawn grow at uneven rates and I love

unevenly and widely. Don’t keep this between us. Instead, let it be in the world.

Let it be with the ghosts of all our past loves and loves, appropriate and inappropriate,

and I won’t tell you which is which. Swirled terrible coffee and and tilted responses 

to come ons. I’m doing my face with misaligned theory–lots of lust and pink,

I put my love in the poem, pitch woo to the poem, make my vows to the poem.

Where’s the bar and where are you? Where’s the conference and where are you?

What sonic aesthetics do you need for me to prove my devotion? Who is time

in your mythology? How do you align with the universe? Listen to me, listen to me.

To be explicit without confessing, this antipsychotic I’m on makes me shake,

this poem I’m in makes me shake. This poem does not support the dualist ontology

in which all finite beings are implausibly divided between people and everything

else. What does the ontology say about desire? Does desire pre-exist its activity 

rather than being created by it? I mean did our kiss exist before we kissed?

The limits of language are the limits of the body, the smell of jasmine, tree roots

pushing through sidewalk, a walking poem, walking ontology. Immaterialism,

not materialism. We have seen that desire often gains the upper hand over its

own constituent pieces, and can even abstain from any action at all. Failed objects,

but never failed desire—an object is better known by its proximate failures

than by its successes. Proximate desires that are not forgone conclusions,

but offer endless counterfactual speculation, not all of it worthless. I mean

the imminent desires that were not abjured presumptions, and by presumptions

I just mean kisses, the possible kisses that did not occur but still actually exist

as objects, and minor objects become, by slow subsumption, a theory of us.

But subsumed into what? I lit three candles and prayed, failed to visit the graves

of my ancestors but must have walked close to them on the tour. This mild

panic is one type of modal reasoning, all of it worthwhile for near-world imagining,

proximate-world thinking, dreams of the otherwise unrealized action. But the object

remains while also managing to leave the atmosphere, or maybe it was never here

exactly but somewhere in the imagined alternative I keep trying to talk about.

There is no poetics I can reclaim except the poetics of lying, maybe. “Yes

I did brush my teeth,” says Desmond, wanting it to be true, knowing it will be 

true in the future, a lyric of untruth. I’m sorry I lost you after the pool party. I’m

sorry I didn’t send more messages when I was away. I’m sorry we didn’t connect.

If this were a madrigal, fa la la, we’d have encountered a sheep instead of a rooster,

and the shepherd would have said something important. “Yes I did brush my teeth!”

said toward the future, until it holds. Forgive the missed crossings—the unsent, 

the unjoined—desire persists, persists—love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew

back, guilty of dust and sin and dualist ontology. Lorraine, you are a top candidate

for this creative content director position, and more. What if the object waits inside

desire? The job inside the application, the application inside the resume, the un-cohered

poem inside the book and the book inside the kiss—as if it were just one kiss—ha!

As if it weren’t part of an entire kissing repertoire: Un bise, un smack. Des baisers 

subsumés. As if my life were my life and all this exhaustion and misdirected energy

were already the poem, the kiss, the job, the partially drafted email, the scheduled 

social media post. Desmond’s teacher calls to say Desmond is distracted and bored,

doesn’t want to do his schoolwork, and I realize this poem is partly a way of avoiding 

the now, the now that is not a point but a field of intensities including distracted, bored 

offspring, kisses, springtime and work. The present tense is crowded with counterfactuals 

that do not disperse, with all the things that happened without expectation.

(I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I did a lot of poeting but not much writing)

I planted seeds today to make up for yesterday’s excess, and just

as I’m about to write this poem Desmond wants to show me a Minecraft

parody of Peppa Pig. Then I discover a line of ants. Envy and mistrust

at work impede my sanity. My team is both under and over-staffed,

and I am overwhelmed, intermittently trying to hard and not trying

enough. The ants have discovered a piece of cheese. I do care what 

my coworkers think, and I need a salary, there’s no denying it. The higher

the better. I don’t know the names of the yellow flowers and glare

at my boss without meaning to. I’m just trying to survive the astrology

of the week, month, year. What are you implying? That survival 

isn’t a goal–but that’s what every holiday is about, every cosmology

is the story of someone or some group eking it out by not dying

year after year and then leaving some kind of archival evidence

that proves their existence. I’m having trouble not feeling bitter 

this afternoon, the senseless emphasis of annual performance reviews

and self-evaluation. What is any good? I pick up the random litter

from our yard and wonder who thinks it’s ok to throw their McDonald’s

wrapper on my rosemary. I mean what does it mean to be good at

something? I am ok at gardening. My approach is to keep doing it

and slowly improve. I tried to write romance novels once, was not

good at it. I am a good enough parent, but I don’t know what kind of bird

is calling outside the kitchen window and I want to be admired for being

myself, which is ridiculous and not ridiculous. I have tried being myself

at work and also hiding as much of myself as possible. Neither is effective.

The blurred non-divide between life and work and the freeing realization

that everything is everything. I used to live in a house with several mantelshelves

and so several fireplaces, all decorated with pictures, mostly. Damnation

is a kind of distinction, I think, drinking my coffee as coffee-in-itself,

or imagining I do. Coco leans into me, sees her name and says, ‘What

are you writing?” And I say, “If you’re going to be all up in my business

you’ll definitely be in the poem.” She touches my earrings, my cheek,

makes baby babble. Desmond yells about not having screentime,

then informs me that I’m distracting myself from writing, then tells

me my hair looks crazy, then laughs and says, “Birds are so funny,

they flock. Flocking birds!” At this point I’m wondering about the parallels

between writing a poem and trying to leave the house on a crummy

Tuesday morning. “Flocking birds these days,” says Desmond, then runs 

into the living room while I grouse about feeling hot and try to have a thought.

Google Gemini says I should say, “I am trying to learn how to be in the world

without being of it,” but that’s not true. We’re all of this world while being 

in it. I’m not on it, though, not this morning, awaiting my annual performance

review, explaining that a lowercase d and an uppercase do go in opposite 

directions, wondering how to quantify the way I’ve spent most of my time

for the approximate past twelve months, wondering what the requirements

exceeding expectations are. “Pretend I’m a grumpy monkey,” Desmond says,

and that’s what I am, a grumpy, slightly panicked creature who can’t shake it off, 

who gets excited when the back brick steps get power washed, tells the children 

to come see, thinks about the relationship between power washing and heartache.

The redbuds bloom and my love is having pizza with a friend, Desmond 

is home sick, and I am supposed to be editing a video but can’t bring

myself to open the file. Melissa texts to say she’s lying in the sun,

“behind the little gazebo,” she says. It is spring. Anything that can be

planted is planted. Axios says “consumers are in a foul, foul mood,”

and NPR says “Women are getting most of the new jobs. What is going

on with men?” Men don’t want to work in healthcare. I check the accrued

interest on my student loans, knowing I’ll never pay them back, knowing

money is real but also largely a collective act of imagination. I consider

a nap, read a little Maurice Blanchot, read some of E’s poems in translation,

do everything but work. I have not had Ritalin for two days. The hello kitty sticker

on my phone peels off. Elation at the thought of travelling alone. Small flirtations

and my pile of unpaired socks. Does Blanchot say anything about how close

or far away the disaster feels. There is no distance in the index, but: “Expression

of infinitude, expression of nothing: do these go together? Yes, but without

Agreement.” Consumers are morose and depressed, but I have the impression 

that it will not impact our spending very much. The Uber driver tells me she was

over on Foxhall road the other day and gas was above six dollars a gallon.

It’s almost time to fill up. My boss says her power is out and I say, ‘oh no!

Good luck,” then wonder if that was a kind of faux pas. I should have said

“Hope it comes back on soon,” or something like that. The little talons of

baby bluebirds. Desmond gifts several brainrots to other Roblex players.

Hilton asks me to imagine a summer vacation where I relax in bed with a

lover and order room service. Desmond drank gallons of Gatorade yesterday

and I swear I heard a Charlie XCX song where she talks about being a demon 

slayer but that was obviously wishful thinking. It’s the end of the world

in the film Sirāt, and one of the characters says that “It’s been the end of 

the world for a long time,” but she says it in French or Spanish. Furled

sails bound securely to the spar. I have to look up what a spar is, and it seems

like a spar is just a generic word for mast, but a spar can be a boom, gaff,

yard or bowsprit, too. It’s been a while since I’ve read Moby Dick. Broken

spars. It’s the kind of material, fragmented vocabulary that fits the novels’

concern with bodies, objects and disassembly. A splintered spar is what

remains when systems fail. I’m at my desk in my bedroom, looking out

the window at my overwintered swiss chard. That’s the kind of life I’m

living. The whole family needs to get passport photos this weekend.

Booking the travel will be easy, but I’m afraid of the paperwork. I haven’t been 

without a passport since I was a baby and I don’t intend for it to continue.

The neighbour blasts Go-Go music. Blanchot says that “We do not repel 

the earth, to which, in any event, we belong; but we do not make of it a refuge…”

The designs for Trump’s stupid, fucking 250-foot arch here in D.C. have been

released, and it looks like a cheesy Arc De Triomphe, which kind of fits with 

the architecture and layout of this city, but I hate it, of course. This is a no-win

situation. I want to call it quits. To dismiss these gestures as gestures, but it’s

all I can think about. I’m looking for a resolution, and there is none, but the poem

has to end. I pay my parking tickets. The cool breeze and ambient traffic noise

off Eastern Avenue come through my window. I want to undergo some kind of

radical transformation, but I’m fighting just to stay awake, just to write these words.

I am waiting for a representative from the moving company to arrive

and give me a moving estimate and they are late, late. The sun through

the window and my thriving plants. I have not looked at the news, 

alive as I am, sullen as I am, staring at bestrewn hay on someone’s

lawn as I drive by,  wondering dully if I should similarly re-seed and bestrew 

hay upon the grass in our front yard. A pardoned Capitol rioter who live-

streamed himself touching women’s hair on the metro last month was arrested

again. I’m preparing for a breakthrough; I contrive an idea that I might

find something new in the archive of dry flowers in my studio. “I’ve noticed

something weird,” says Coco. “Do birds eat grass?” I start to say something

about what starlings eat but lack information. I can’t stay focused today, 

keep thinking about Iran and Lebanon, keep humming songs from K-Pop

Demon Hunters and checking my email. I want news but not the actual

news. Want someone to tell me they’re giving me money or publishing

a poem. I’m ready to be tractable today. Convince me. Is this a madrigal?

No, it’s already too long, but I long for poetic polyphony, something uplifting

but real. In one week, I’ll be in New Orleans at a conference, and I’m already

anxious about leaving my family and anxious about who I’ll see. I canvass

my friends, ask if I should be worried. I know the answer is no. My unsteady

mood is not ready for this clarity, cannot read a compass, cannot unamass

enough nervous energy to just push on through. To what, anyway. What would

an oneiromancer say about last night’s dream where I married my highschool

boyfriend? This is a new dream development. In adulthood, my dreams return

to former lovers more often than anything else. I found a hawktail feather in my

drawer, feathers are made of a central shaft with branching fibers called barbs,

and each barb has even smaller branches called barbules. The barbules of

dreams are the associative ideas based on the few things you remember.

I remember in dreams that people are not themselves, they are often marvels,

messengers, obstacles and cerebral reminders of what has passed and what

is to come, if we can be reminded about the future. What are the chances

that the signification of certain people and objects detaches from them to

become a melange of significations? What are the circumstances of this

detachment? I have loved a lot of people, so don’t intimate that I’m stingy. 

I’ve probably loved you, engaged in at least minor flirtation. And why not?

The grimy, un-empty echos of love bring me closer to some solution. The clingy

vestiges of romance are not for me, and in this fashion I formate a kind of

burning patience, the patience of fire on a slow burn, the patience of 

bad romance, which is the patience of romance, the patience of conversation,

of hesitating revelation. We don’t need to know everything all at once,

statements of falsity are as likely as statements of fact. A starling eats 

whatever it wants. In spring and summer they eat invertebrates, their favorites. 

So truth and error interlace. Late, late, I wait for the call that does not come,

I do not read the news, but news arrives. I cannot compass this turning, this

weather of nerves, this half-articulated conversation. A starling sings again.

What are the relational metaphysics of Tuesday compared to Monday?

Compared to the oppressive goals of an old essentialism? I cannot truly

know the essence of Tuesday or any other day, not through study

or precisely-wrought out regimens. The work week is cruelly made,

no doubt. Desmond calls it unfair. If reality exists as a surplus

even beyond the causal interactions of dust and raindrops,

then I will continue to wish for more sleep, regardless of how much

sleep I actually get, for sleep is never fully expressed. The cyclopes

were of three groups, according to ancient mythographers. Some were

Gods, some were shepherds, and some were wall-builders. This is

not an appeal to a sound, table-thumping materialism and I don’t not

concur with the mythographers. Once we speak of objects–of cyclopes–

in terms of surprise and opacity, we cannot reduce them to their actions

and relations any more than to their ultimate pieces. The atoms of

a cyclops are just as real as a cyclops, and the hours and minutes

as real as the days. I feel bent, I mean refracted, by the transition

from day to day, but there’s no hidden essential core to me or my

atoms, or to any mythological creature that might or might not

come along. I’d like to be a shepherd on an island, at least occasionally.

There is existential potential in being an isolated, monstrous

tender of sheep. No hidden materiality, just the simultaneous 

participation in all of the modes other than the one we happen 

to be considering at any given moment. The spontaneous appearance

of dumplings and the flattening of attention, the achromatin

un-coloring, maybe undistinguishing, continuum of experience. 

I have wanted to go to Iran my entire life, to eat the same food

that nourished me in my mother’s womb, see the birthplace

of the founder of a religion I no longer subscribe to but still think

of with fondness. Is it possible to be fond of a religion one has

rejected? No one has direct access to political truth, there is 

no unpopular thing-in-itself, as such. I can make a poem without

knowing what the poem is about. I’m better with sentences,

but knowing the content of a sentence is a tenuous endeavor,

too. The sentence is made of words. The sentence expresses

an idea. When Trump tweets that “a whole civilization will die

tonight,” he threatens genocide. What redress is there for such

a statement, as if a sentence is not both its words and its action.

There’s an obvious and permanent difference between a thing and 

knowledge of it. I expected to feel overwhelmed by parenting

without knowing what being overwhelmed would be like. Knowledge

of the Easter egg is not the egg. “It’s not even Easter,” Coco said

when they looked for eggs on Monday after school. “Yes,” I say,

“but yesterday was too rainy for the Easter Bunny.” In the house,

the light from all the lamps and windows unites into the light,

but each light source and its light are distinct, too. The undifferentiated

light and the undivided brightness. But what do we do about shadows,

which are also a part of the light in the house? If anything brings together

the poets and the philosophers, it is the claim to a non-knowledge

that is nonetheless not just negative. It’s not all or nothing.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Says Desmond, waving his Capri Sun, “I’m the 

president.” In the car, “Iris,” by the Goo Goo Dolls comes on and I actually

get shivers. What is happening? “Everything seems like a movie,

yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive.” It’s clearly about

the Spectacle. What is happening, I continue to think, as I wait for

the green left turn arrow, my reality augmented with this song and 

sudden understanding of a recent TikTok trend, a rampantly nostalgic

one. My sanity is not boozy enough, and there’s no reset button

for sanity. I have been working all day in the demeaning, empowering

way that a job is a job and inhumanity is inhumanity. The inanity 

of tasks, some tasks at least. I bought a bouquet of flowers for Coco’s

birthday but they won’t last. My apathy won’t last. Desmond sings along

to the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and dances.

Hey now, friend. Now I’m staring at an empty glass. Now I’m wondering

about the apocalypse and the rocket NASA just sent around the moon.

How much skepticism is allowed? Pondering my lack of options, I pour

a beer, admit I’m uptight, think of lost loves as a way of remembering

that I am a complex person. I have loved a circus performer and many

poets. The twigs hereof are physic. The lies hereof are physic, too, and

worsen with time and space, but my love for the circus performer was

not a lie. None of my loves have been lies, though some of them have

been stupid, possibly ridiculous, and caused not by the relationship 

between two subjects but instead by the thrall between two love objects.

I begin to see my errors. The excessive garlic, the one drink too many.

Coco screams because she can’t make the CD play pay her favorite 

K Pop Demon Hunters song. I’d like a nice Bordeaux and some cheese.

Too much meatloaf has ruined the evening. I’m not a behaviorist but

I get the appeal of pattern and repetition. If life is no more than a series

of gestures, a broken series of skin-of-the-teeth, mostly successful

signals, if it is, then I talked enthusiastically about data sets with 

someone who was relieved that I could put one together. “I’m the

President!” Insists Desmond. I don’t want the world to see me, I think,

I want to rewatch The X-Files while exercising on the elliptical trainer.

Now there’s coffee and the morning, the prayer book and portrait of 

my great, great grandmother I found in the box while cleaning out my

studio. Trevor asks if this poem is giving me trouble and it is. Coco

and Desmond curled into our bed last night and I imagine we are in

a fox den together. The Department of Homeland Security is still shut

down and I hate the DHS but like someone I know who works there

and wonder to what extent a philosopher would find me ethically

complicit in all the harms perpetuated by my country, if philosophers

even think about that. Lettuce and radishes are sprouting, just not 

where the squirrels keep digging. The questions come, like always.

Who was I in the nineties? Often a girl with a boyfriend and many 

confusing friendships. Sometimes I was in China. That’s not the nostalgia

of the TikTok trend. Sometimes I was on the back of my friend’s 

bicycle with my arms around her waist, riding over the Pearl River 

in Guangzhou, or running through construction sites. Nostalgia

gets a little more interesting when subjected to reality.