Tag: lorraine

At first, I bewail. After ten minutes, I settle into weeping, reading accounts

of people looking for kin among the bodies recovered from yet another mass

grave in Palestine. I spent the day with friends, talking poetry, renouncing 

parenting and work for an afternoon. My body, agitated to impasse,

hives out and the regular solar plexus despair node says “you will surmount

nothing, Poet!” and I say nothing. My mourning is a minimal offering that

makes nothing tangible happen except this poem. Imagine the actual words 

doing something substantial and particular, say the slow long lines contend 

with grief and habitual lassitude, know they’re steeped in the un-undoable violent

paradoxes of American English and white lady tears but keep versing. Trevor

pulls a tick off Desmond who says, “I’ll never roll in the grass again,” and next

to me Coco sleeps off a sore throat while my neck pain moves closer to migraine.

I napped in the grass growing up, avoiding bees, wasps and nettles. The effects

of apocalypse are I don’t know, uncertainty is a given, but the arcane practice 

of any mental gymnastics required to harm people in a hospital is murderous 

self-sabotage, fear of failure. You, IDF and you–Great-great grandpas, with your 

inadequate  support systems other than white supremacy, even though you didn’t 

believe: May we weep. May we deeply feel our unbearable guilt. May we unbend our

unbearability and hold these contradictions. May we divest and may we reckon.

May we accept the implications of what can and cannot be enumerated. I append

this prayer to the poem, knowing there are many armageddons. This morning

I gave the church lady rosemary, thyme and mint from the garden, said I’d read

the Psalms. “After the apocalypse we’ll live like this,” she said. “I’ll dry these for tea.” 

David spends a lot of time asking God what God is doing, and why are they taking 

so long. The church lady recommends tea in anticipation of the end times. Coco

sleeps perpendicular, minimizes bedspace. Preparation variously about birth,

and drinking tea, and getting your shit together to build the magic portal, though

no one opens the gate alone.  Henceforth the poem sings to pass over the earth

to some immortal estuary where it can cease libration, where its heartstrings can 

rest without hierarchical interference. As if freedom might possess us like the

holy spirit, and all this weeping and wailing might carry us out to sea.

I’ve eaten too many cinnamon cream cookies in an effort to feel grounded

and want to bring the rest to encamped students at George Washington 

University, my alma mater now threatening student suspension. I am astounded

by the boringness of administrators–not astounded, but aggrieved.  Emotions 

emerge: If I feel good at all today it is because of these students and my sister

at UT Austin facing mounted police and all the movement work my sister

and comrades have done at Rutgers that’s gotten zero media attention. Why whisper

when you can chant. The not-yet-migraine neck pain, everyday traducement.

Not concerned about students, protestors, Palestinians or anyone being peaceful.

Charmed and unconcerned, I prepare a list of technical requirements for a thing

at work. In serious WTF news I interviewed for a position with a base salary of 200k.

Do they know who I am, minor poet and basket weaver wearing an old bra, no

socks.  When am I most disoriented? Is it falling asleep or waking up? Disorientation

is all I’ve ever wanted, disorientation and love and wine, a little making out

on the beach before a nap. This will not scandalize you nearly enough, the absurd

duplication of so many absurd tasks resulting in so many absurd work products.

Without cessation, I project facial expressions, offer various hand gestures,

express frustration with self and supervisor and self as supervisor. Antispasmodic

digital products could be a thing, I think, as I add funds to Desmond and Coco’s

Scholastic book fair e-wallets. What I want to call incredible panic is entirely

credible, completely the norm. What should not be the norm are mounted police

at anti-genocide protests in the United States.  Other norms to rethink: my inability

to function without fluoxetine. There is no benign baseline to account for my quarterly

increase in panic, and those capsules are all out hard to swallow.  By Friday afternoon 

I lack civility or social filters. “I have left the office,” I Slack my boss, “would you like me

to return and do x, y, z?” No response. Three nights ago the full moon had me swoony

with longing to sing of impending doom in a mournful, unearthly voice: it’s too late.

Nothing’s on the rise, it’s here, it’s here, so I sing like a banshee about the means of

thwarting reactionary violence as if I know what business as usual is not, as if I am

not distrait and taciturn with premonition. Desmond climbs three-quarters of the way

up a tree and says, “these leaves are my home and will protect me.” Yes, child. Stay

in the tree. We don’t have to go home and work, or make dinner, or sleep to be

productive tomorrow, or double-check that the datagrams have sufficiently passed 

across the network to whatever degree that matters. I check the plants. The fig tree leafs

around and out, the aphids eat some honeysuckle and I overprune it. As biased as

an oblique slant athwart empire, which means these statistics run a sharp transverse 

across conventional presumptions. Can we arrive crossways? Can whatever arrives 

arrive crossways? Miles east in Ohio Brett reminds me that literal Nazi’s are protected

on campus under free speech laws. That’s how this is arriving, arrives, has arrived.

This moment with its unsmooth contours, attention unfolding from the abyss

between given and received, or subject and object. We have to mostly agree

on the abyss, or at least agree to share it, but orientation matters. Reminisce 

about how we came to share this particular primordial chaos, to be deep-sea

edge or deep-earth bound, as if I didn’t return home from work and lose patience

with Coco and Desmond, as if I returned home from work to the beastly human pathos

of my family, could just tolerate my love, the legwork required for virtuous complacence.

Some arrivals unsettle. My arrival home from work. A refusal to parse where the chaos

comes from and how while creating more chaos, the mise-en-abîme of mise en abyme. 

I came home and was not on board with the moment’s particular iteration of the void,

could not vibe, could not parent, could not be a container for the mixed archaeology

of feelings, the way I fail to inhabit my various inheritances and the way I inhabit

them perfectly. So I remove the magnetic blocks from the bathtub that are scraping

the bathtub coating and tell Desmond, without humor or irony, that I will remove

his bed tent if he continues to do x, y, and z. Sad girlfriend, nagging wife, stern mother. 

I cannot believe I behave this way and yet I can and do behave this way, easily.

A queer genealogy seems like something I should have to earn, which is a very

unqueer way of thinking about inheritance. Lines do not always direct us, somehow.

Once settled and unsettled my ancestors did not return but instead turned toward

somewhere else, until the act of turning toward somewhere else became its own

line. Is the angel of history relevant here? I don’t think white people can refuse whiteness,

but we can refuse to follow its lines, refuse desire for domination, for

productivity, we could become collectively angry about whiteness and reorient. 

When Desmond wigs out I think of all the times I pick fights over the most minor

thing possible because the magnitude of rage or despair is too much.

I picture my late eighteenth century ancestors saying “dash my wig” to avoid

stronger imprecations. Do not avoid them. Scream, punch your pillow. Dream.

The state of the state. The opposite of Empire is ecosystem or flux;

Henri Chopin said “It is man’s [sic] body that is poetry, and the streets,”

those not-quite-right vibes, the poet’s tendency toward self destruction,

I appreciate that. High-level meetings with creditor nations bring no surcease. 

Any meeting with the flux or ecosystem would require a mental abruption

to release our persistent habit of adding more police every time crime

increases. I am good at experimental disassembly, I am not a body 

on the streets of the state, sometimes I am citizen, trying new root vegetables

like kohlrabi: why? Traders brought it to Italy in the sixteenth century,

but cabbage has been a thing in Europe for a while and my ancestors

probably ate various forms kale, which makes me feel I-don’t-know-what

when I crave a kale smoothie. Trevor says, “cabbage tastes delicious

if you cook it with other things” and Coco continues to ask about the number

of things in the world. Her world is abundance with precise sensory detail,

I write to remember anything, but my memory goals are ambitious. Somewhere 

between Empire and ecology are words like military, citizen, and their opposites.

I can’t see the moon or pluto but I believe in them, believe in this neck pain

that three days hence will be a migraine. I like the monotony of living. 

All creatures love a routine, even the ones that don’t. Non-combatants, civilians,

foreigners and aliens all crave at least occasional predictability: The sun,

the earth, the air. We don’t crave the stupid decisions of Columbia University’s

president but we can predict them. Liberation is not predictable: It wasn’t

inevitable that God would keep hardening Pharaoh’s heart, or that the Jew’s Egyptian

neighbors would give them supplies as they fled, or that Pharaoh would march

into the Red Sea. Narrative is full of disasters and inevitability. If you march in formation

you’re an army, but if you walk  a scraggly line you’re people, maybe refugees, 

There is no total pervasion of apathy. There is debate, dissent, if you march

in formation you might be hundreds of activists holding an emergency seder on

the Senate Majority Leader’s doorstep. In this era of misrule my country sends

billions of dollars to the Israeli military even after the discovery of a mass grave

with over 300 Palestinians uncovered at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan

Younis, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I can’t bear the star-spangled 

Irrationality, I won’t explain the difference between an Empire and an ecosystem. 

We’re in it. Them. Are it. Them. That’s us, ourselves, but collectively. We’re it.

“When I arrived in that town, everyone greeted me and I recognized 

no one. When I was going to read my verses, the Devil, hidden behind

a tree, called out to me sarcastically and filled my hands with newspaper clippings”

– J.V. Foix

I do not live in a seashell’s heart, but I pick up Coco and Desmond at school

and imagine with fellow parents that a groundswell change of public opinion is 

enough to end the relationship between wage labor and time while our children

play hide and seek. When I sleep, I see clearly, and when I wake, I go to campus 

and forget to pack after-school snacks the day before a full moon. Empty freedom

from fear, I made a list like a border and another like desire, I await the stars

and moon like a good poet dabbling in vatic verse. Not as in Vatican but as in vates 

or wood, woden, Oden. Some distant ancestors probably worshiped him and his ravens, 

mead and runes. Narrative is always strange: drink this mead of fermented blood

and honey to answer any question. Walk back to the car through the little forest

carpeted with fig buttercup, a beautiful invasive spring ephemeral my ancestors

brought from Europe, not knowing it would crowd out bloodroot and wild ginger.

There is nothing to write about, and Coco asks how many things there are 

in the world. “A thousand?” She guesses. Trevor tells her it’s all about what counts

as a thing, the politics of aesthetics. There is one Desmond with ten toes.  

I go outside to look at the moon. Whatever I count can’t matter, but I’m looking 

at the moon, and looking is a kind of counting. I mean storytelling. I mean reckoning.

In this season of misrule I pick up my babies from aftercare, my babies born not within

a seashell’s heart, but within the territorial dominion of this country, not murdered and

left unconsecrated. Sometimes I go to a desk in a shared office or wrapped in blankets

work in a cold studio. I try to get Desmond and Coco excited about visiting the arboretum.

I’d never be the ambassador, but I might be the aging charge d’affairs, writing her memoirs,

getting drunk most evenings, free to actively undermine Empire’s tenuous mandate. 

Settlers don’t prioritize how their own ideas of nationhood and haven-making

undermine even their own ideas of nations and havens. Post-bloom redbuds

across the street not quite yet leafed out. All of this is true. I am not an allegorist.

UMD students started an encampment but no one from central mentioned protestors. 

A coworker pings me saying bla bla bla, but I pick up the phone as if I want an injury.

I pick up the phone and almost read the message. Coco and Desmond argue in the car

about the school playground, and I know any coming to account for this day

requires details about bulldozed farms in Gaza and my piled unfolded clean clothes 

half off my desk. When I hike I look down every cliff and imagine losing my footing,

worry about the dove nesting over our door and her future fledgelings.

For Jerome Rothenburg

The last time I was in an airport, a private company bamboozled me

into signing up for a trial of their security screening program and later

I was rueful about it and canceled. Even in errancy, I could pack a bag

and fly, before babies, before covid, was always self-assured at the

airport bar, lollygagging a last drink before my flight. Sixty percent

of the time I’m nauseous and trying to hide it. My body dissents in

any way involving ears or hives, so many birthdays flying between

hemispheres, as if being vaguely bilious, itchy or tipsy in concourse 

whatever was my particular predicament. What counterforce changed

my fate? I’m not immune to immanent what-ifing or zero-sum thinking

that maybe I exchanged x for y, that I shouldn’t have done a stint

as a daytime bartender and dog walker, should have immediately

gone to graduate school, should have obediently followed an intelligible

path to something like a livelihood. But I don’t actually think that.

I wish I had more money, sort of. Coco screams because the pajamas

are wrong, then screams because she needs someone to be with

her while she screams. I’m at my screaming threshold. Parenting

is helping others when you feel like an incompetent wreck. I think

of escaping to the Cotswolds, walking between pubs and eating

chestnuts, Trevor helps Coco find not displeasing sleeping attire,

Earth holds me when I scream, or the car contains me while Earth

supports the car. Where am I, was I? Post-bath and bedtime, I

read about the status of the ceasefire talks in Gaza, Passover begins

tomorrow evening and I will go to work in this not really quagmire

of an Imperial capital. If it were swamp I’d love it more, but we are

sinking, I hope. I used to feel some vaguely magisterial presence

on the Lincoln Memorial steps. Maybe I need to go there and pray, 

connect with some omnipresent collective grief, feel queasy and obscure

by the reflecting pool, drive thirty miles an hour part way round the beltway

at rush hour as if I lived in Maryland. Instead I bike to the studio, string

and unstring a loom, go to yoga, do a forward bend and then another,

again I wonder why no one has written an anthropology of airports. 48 

hours in London, Heathrow. Why didn’t I get a hotel room? It’s now late 

April and I am thinking of Moses’ adopted mother, the Pharaoh’s daughter,

how the Jews’ Egyptian neighbors gave them gold and silver and clothing as

they left Egypt. The song sparrows abandoned the nest and now above the

door a dove incubates her eggs How in Exodus The LORD seems 

like an explanation not a cause. I can’t dispose of these contradictions.

In dreams I swim deep or float through various apocalyptic landscapes,

the flood is coming but I have learned to live in the water and my dream sea-

scape is calm. Sometimes I picnic in airports, imagine regime change, 

sometimes a lover or friend brings me food and they are always a sign of

the dream’s plutonian dregs, a baseline for the sweetness and trauma 

transforming. In the non-dream world the waters rise, too. When the end

comes, I’ll go to the Full Yum on North Capitol Street. I’ll bring my babies and sweethearts.

We’ll get pork egg fu young and beef chow fun to go, and then we’ll float.

Abide in a contact zone, we all do, are. I can. I cannot. What I take

to be mine makes me. Lost objects packed. Grow alone, I grew

with family, and where did your family grow, your parents and their 

parents? The way you eat a hot dog without mustard. The mostly happy

gravity of immediate kinship and its calamities: my children are not yet

a category of Spanish-speaker but will be. You’re from D.C.; you went

to one of those bilingual schools. America is just another place, and I 

cannot despair, the dear pure nothing is pure bullshit. The modernist obsession 

with alienation and othering. I mean I spent years and hours in Chinese class

and in China learning Mandarin but have never translated anything except

the news. The origins of my feelings are opaque to me, but fundamentally 

unmysterious. Phaethon was fundamentally transparent. The splendid pedigrees 

of seven generations of dubious documentation. Heaven is a cafe, anywhere. 

The deafening sound of traffic is not an object lesson, but understanding 

seventy percent of anything is. If othering is a form of extension 

(Sarah Ahmed), that extends reach through incorporation, long standing

acquisitive feelings. Oh shit this is empire, again. I have been it’s

mediocre agent since I was a babe, tending towards the exotic but

unable to be something other. I cannot. I am not the sunburned American

in the Ecuadorian jungle, the habit of being at home, the habit of

high-impact camping. The new hybrid as the new idealized mix of the pure.

Jesus fucking Christ I am saying that I am white but my whiteness tends

towards I don’t know. Fat bureaucrats with crummy posts far from the capital. 

Disenfranchised soldiers. My great great grandfather didn’t want to

work on the railroad and didn’t want to work on the farm but mostly worked

on the railroad and drank. When does appropriation become the new

capitalist hybrid? This is a question I cannot I cannot get over. Am I

an ally or am I a thief. I am both, the relief of being conflated with something

interesting the way confession never is. You know what I’d confess.

Most immediate tasks have no recompense. This social media schedule,

for example, as if I walk my roof at dawn, leaning onto the parapets, 

leaning into sunrise. Kickoff, am, pm and post-event posts. I lack the emprise

for a complete schedule. So, the half-made schedule. The draft poem was this:

I want to buy so much stuff, and I want to buy it on credit then never pay it back.

I wanted to name Desmond Beckett before he was born, imagined building 

a small dovecote in the backyard, but instead dug garden beds and built low, 

slightly tilting brick divides. I am agnostic about schedules but faithful to strategy: 

I made this special schedule for you, without strategy. Gallant, I send it early,

knowing it will remain unreviewed, imagine printing it on pearl-colored paper, revel

in the bureaucratic beauty of a schedule with no design except itself, the beauty

of charts and graphs and slides, of timetables. The parapets prevent accidentally 

falling into the sunrise, but I’d prefer that to this damnable marketing brief. 

On behalf of the team I note that although this is a roundtable discussion 

there will be no roundtables in the room and no repercussions for their lack.

I go to a shared workspace, sometimes, with a new, difficult-to-open window.

Imagine the courtyard is a canal and below the window a basic boat que c’est

bateau. But it’s enough to float away from work and capitalism and drift on

a lazy wave to somewhere reasonable, where everyone understands that being

overwhelmed and rageful is the only feasible response to knowing how much 

our taxes go to war and the contractors of war. Somehow I’m a poet paying

taxes and making social media schedules, interviewing for other jobs via

text messages with robots. There are no detractors of poetry, just disparaging

non-listeners or former and secret poets. I would buy so many different serums,

so many button-down shirts in various bright prints like my dad used to wear. Batik

shirts. Guayaberas. Shirts with ornate prints like 18th-century British wallpaper,

and then I would buy out of print art books and ugly crocs, cut my hair every four

months instead of once a year. Die it pink-magenta ombre. Amazon orders as 

an archive of distraction from everything, everything, from knowing that children

might sleep through a bomb blast then wake up in dust, or never wake, that I

make social media schedules while my country sends bombs everywhere,

everywhere, while empire carries on but somehow, something bursts through,

though prior power remains and I feel dumb saying things like “burn the castle,”

because what is a castle? This campaign has no strategy except to please

my supervisor, I promise. Once again, I abstain from strategy, from belaboring the point.