THE SOLAR WAKE
We drink rosé in the dark and talk about ghost forests
out in Oregon where they discovered how an orphan
tsunami formed from a genocide of trees–salt water
flooding the cedar roots. Such simultaneous death
is like awaiting nukes in the modern day where each voice
becomes a husk and we slowly become inanimate,
vegetal statues and ponder how we ever evolved
a stomach. It is a delicate process
to make all our organs sing together like faucets,
each a body of moving water, leveling off under a Shanghai
moon. We like our women starving, I tell you in the dark,
and we are sitting across from each other while the street noise
from the city blows us into a late evening hum.
You don’t understand and so I tell you to watch five women
eat for a week and see how they mourn their tomatoes,
that they are intent on dis-appearing (who could blame them)
that many women are training ourselves to run and become so light
that we refuse gravity, refuse you, that when you fuck us,
we are not even there, we have found a way out of our bodies.
The tsunami’s salt water dehydrated the cedars.
The orphan found its mother in a Cascadian fault.
The trees went hungry for weeks, took their time to die,
all watching each other lose their bark and limbs,
become bare and slim. What a radical fairy you will be
when your food coma becomes the haphazard
Titanian light. What visions we have when our energies
are re-nourished after a long spell of a pressed organ.
In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Hermia defies her father
and says: I do not know by what power I am made bold.
But of course she does. It is the presence of the Amazonian
Queen, Hippolyta, sitting big in the quadrant of a kingdom,
making dinner for all the women she loves.
At a bar in Santa Barbara called The Press Room,
a woman I know tells me that she once managed not to eat
for five days. We were drinking in a dark not unlike this one,
the kind that cannot make figures of pride or shame.
§
IN THE BEGINNING
There is Muddy Waters in the floods with Bach,
Sarah Vaughn and Verdi on a float. There is a small utopia
in the form of a raft, bobbing down a small canal in the left
hemisphere of a brain. There is a canal in Berlin.
There is a heart and heartbreak busting new geographies,
making a novel planet of all of us and a portraitist
painting commissions of the wealthy Quebecois
in a Montreal loft, the snows in soft collision
with the community gardens outside, sterile
like the smile of the family with their severe warmth.
Oil paintings take years to dry and I want to weep into them,
a longevity built on chemical tears of water, potassium,
a pleasuring glucose making a home in the nerves
of your face. Infants cannot weep. Your infant is the first
executioner who you kiss. Openly. Who you bathe like
a clock impersonating your adulthood, like a pile of dead asters
interrogating you from the window. Asta is the name
of a dog from an old detective serial called Nick and Nora
where they drank endless martinis and flirted with guns.
There are guns in the snowbank and in the classroom,
in the casinos and someone’s car, in the firesafe
of a wealthy man. When men rage, they want to take
everyone with them. We mistake vigils for vigilantes.
Sometimes I throw so many clothes around my room—
piles of silk coats and tulle skirts. They begin to take the shape
of people. I wake up in the night and they look like
flat bodies evacuated out of the fabric,
an army of ballerinas gone missing.
§
NO BLACK. NO ASIAN. NO FEMME.
At Jeepney’s in the East Village, Phillip and I
bite caramel chunks through plastic straws
and she tells me about the phone app
where browsing through virtual worlds,
she discovers their key mantra.
They hate her high pitched Filipino voice,
her slender frame, that wicked black coif
like an ocean wave resting in mid curl.
They hate her new pronoun.
Her custom navy suit. Her gym and banker beau.
Her job selling million dollar real estate.
Her mother, who she hasn’t seen in three years.
They hate her contradictions striking the furniture
as she moves into a restaurant like a matchstick.
She shows me the phone. Those words,
appearing in headless profiles of abs and pelvic
bones bursting from their frames:
No Black. No Asian. No Femme.
No Black. No Asian. No Femme.
No Black. No Asian. No Femme.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
We order another glass of champagne
or maybe it was a sidecar.
I cry a little into a banana leaf.
I don’t know why this stuff still kills me
to be a couple of brown femmes spitting
with laughter at their own repulsion
projected flagrantly on the white screen.
What does it mean to be undesirable.
An answer the internet cannot give.
Dear Phillip, I do not know.
Dear Phillip, each of your utterances
is a plow through my weary, weary heart.
Dear Phillip, what was that thing
we mistook for a liberation.