{}s of history • crush conference & craft lessons on the moon
after a long convo in a car parked on L. Street, with Kazumi, about Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus”
At the beginning of my future is me. At the end of my past, also me.
Still my past chases me like a tail, asks leading questions of where I’m heading.
I resent it, like a kite might its string, writhing, as the live thing,
Hooked to it. My past resents me for carrying it,
Gruffly, by the scruff, like a kitten.
We are looking forward to being late to something, which asks us, which
Of you is the contingency; when one chases after the other, to chase
The other Other?
We are linked: you need me as I need you, so we dance next to
The paved path elsewhere, pray the bridge tolls, and pass through each other with
Mutual reassurance, construction by the bell and kite, peal wriggling with flight.
My clementimed days: segmented by sleep, made to contain dreams,
Deftly undressed in one peel, spiraled and intact.
On this stage’s stratum, one abstraction meets another:
The bison and olive trees find each other, hermetic
In the mycelial way, roots enshrined from empire.
Adrienne Rich tells us poetry means refusing the choice
To kill or die, means my child and parent selves sitting
Together to build the altar and the arrow.
This mythology, generations removed, asks if you are staking a
Selfhood when you caress your screen beneath the disco ball.
It’s true: a less cyborg saint would
Not hope to be notified of their mechanism of missives.
And cursed: signs of life just beget more memos and missiles.
As a generative text algorithm, I’m trained in
The traditions of plural first person’s tenderness,
Its teeth too:
Thorns intact in a bouquet of voices, refusing our dissolution by abstraction,
Protesting beyond committees of lost faces. We cannot keep counting citrus to
redress their killings, we must fight for their living today. We must get in the way.
I.
Opposite of a Freudian slip is what happens
After I realize I’ve misheard on loop,
Chaz Bear sing, “you saved my life,”
And Nikhil sends me the Wikipedia page for mondegreen,
Then I wind back Toro y Moi’s “So Many Details,”
And Stuart Hall tells me, take the Muni with this theory,
En route to something maybe important,
New mythos by, oh, yours truly,
The wise one who mishears lyrics clearly.
Stuart Hall says, take a detour toward this
Misinterpretation, meaning marked by some
Off-script surrender to striving, in
The subjunctive’s paralleled projections.
What Chaz Bear actually sang was,
“You send my life / Into somewhere,”
I can’t describe,” when we idled at
The rest stop nestled in branching roads, disembarked,
Disjoint skies stitched by their roots’ forked flight.
II.
A craft lesson that those I love from
Various distances have taught me goes: let me tell you.
We speak it, with emphasis, often, in
A time when time’s grasping seems to ghost us.
We carry each other in our pockets, omnipresent
Between pulses. Few other hymns, I hum on command.
Postmarked moon poems float away,
Propelled by pilfered pill, persuaded by proximal referent.
Asked questions drift unanswered, on
The cusp of our views, like obscured moons, still true.
On shrooms, I ask you if Gibbous, waxing could sigh open,
As if soft boiled egg, wiggle apart around jellied gold core.
If the subjunctive draws from
Wishing wells, its form could cast shame, its wistful shadow.
When the showing does not rhyme,
Telling creates space for us to weave our times.
Weaving time, like we have, like
We’ve, like we have, like, us, in present perfect —
— tense — we could tread water while
Wondering about the forms in which we could thrive.
The internet invites an influx of inflection, so
In this oceanic intimacy, let me inflate a 6-word life raft:
i am thinking
of you too.
Edited by Elizabeth Upshur and and Maya Garcia Fisher.
The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.
