of the ocean surrounded by glowing tubes
eating other glowing tubes. How I want to collide
with everything. It takes a wound for a wound
to heal and I need the light to make a mistake of me.
Chemical fantastic, this world inexplicable.
I prop open the screen door with a broken
harmonium. I vote for a lake. I breathe
the same air as birds. I wrap myself in beer.
I was born here of parents born here
from parents the same. They went to work
between boilers and ate tires with Hart Crane.
They walked on their elbows to lick fire
from the river. They got divorces
and more divorces and I got myself a name.
The name a child at the end of its body.
Like in the infant dark an instinctual verb.
A glitch in the organ of my name. My name
displaced from its architecture and there
the machine approaching me like an animal
tamer lonely for its animal and both of us
asleep in some plural center, though
on the periphery my body never sleeps,
since the day I was born—code stumbling
and unclear, an ecosystem inventing itself
under the overpass, and you and me and
all our friends touching our gonads
as if our hands were about to go extinct,
as if I couldn’t say at least one thing
that matters even the slightest bit to someone,
as if language is an exit with no way out
and we’re all scratching our names into
the final obelisk surrounded by the perfume
of a thousand thousand wires tattooed
to the air emitting tongueless mysteries
in the amphitheatres of our heavy skulls
where some unknowable yawning limit
infects us with the flesh of the entire universe,
airplanes full of wilderness nuzzling the stars,
and a young, ageless girl cutting the sun from the sky
and keeping it in her pocket next to a cold
smooth stone from the river where her brothers
swim and nothing is digital, a young girl
not responsible for the pageant between
her ears and hence imagining no war
other than the tension between the space
where the pattern ends and whatever
isn’t the pattern begins. Does it bother you
that in the dark the billboards are still there?
Do you have an understanding of the legal system
of your country in relation to other countries?
Would it be beautiful to be a window?
Would you rather be sincere or a river?
Does camping make you feel less complicit?
Complicit in what? What lobular fervor?
Which ocean of whiskey? Why can’t I
stop loving you? Rather than answers,
does the asking of these questions point
towards the essential issue to our being
in the world and communicating which is that
language knows more about the world
than we ever will? Or am I framing this wrong?
Does language know anything or is it just
some kind of technology, an aviary, a field
of scissors? Is it worth it to worry or should
I keep thinking about lemonade?
Aren’t they the same breed of wolf?
O endless array of the occasional and scarfs!
Dost thou delight in unsober’d music?
I have a notion to essence! I’m running out
of decisions! A bird lives in a bird’s mouth
says the letter I’ve been writing you
every night for ten thousand years. O collateral
dandelion! A blue coat ringing in the kingdom.
This music is a warning: I’m nothing but stupid.
All this is is a fist full of telephones
filled with the same immense voicemail,
an almost translucent string of sounds
resembling light more than language,
the basic message being: I feel fucking yes.
My heart making out with your heart in the mist
of sprinklers, our hips secret beaches sweet
with nonsense and campfire smoke and an illimitable
unspoken feeling that regardless of this being
a complete mistake it is, in fact, complete,
and amidst the ongoing collapse of laughter
my head fills with something that is not control
in favor of reciting sunflowers on some wet wet
interstate perhaps not so far from here where
this system is neverending sufficiently and I
might fall asleep in your daffodils with a smile
smashed against my face. Can you see me
right now or are we far away from each other?
Do you know where I live or what color
my eyes are? Does that matter to you
or would you rather I act like an author?
I have no idea how I’ve gotten this far
without saying anything about cats.
Does that make us more or less similar?
Do you want to go up on the roof
of wherever you are and drink lemonade
with me? Do you know how close you are
to birds no matter what you’re doing?
O human trying! O American bison!
Squirrels, delicious sleep, my ass! Mistakes!
Let’s climb a tree and jump into a pile
of ash berries. Let’s use my mother’s mouth
as a door into my birthday. Let’s eat pie
with our fingers and install confetti cannons
set to go off when a sad person walks by.
Let’s kneel in the dirt – what is there to say?
Let’s write a poem made entirely of lemonade
and email it to God. Let’s undress each other
using birds. When I was nineteen I wrote
the way words look is often more interesting
than how they sound and that is something
I didn’t fully grasp until I beheaded an ambulance
and swallowed the siren and since then it’s been
inappropriate fabulous in my pleasure hive,
echoes twitching in my teeth, excitement
an inexhaustible ignition, evil violins pawing the sky,
reinventing the word flammable to start again
from ashes, blood bucketing in an approximation
of the circumference of an accident that’s left
me blessing the abyss and the see-saw, broken
charming swarm feeling good as a pile of chairs
teetering in the tawny dawn. O vulva toggle
derelict and flickering! Lilacs locked in the pillory!
One day I’m going to die and I’ll never again
feel the word tambourine rattle on my tongue
and if you don’t think it “makes sense” to wear
corsages made of rain disconnected from the sky,
or to draw perforated lines on each others’ bodies
and rename our favorite parts after Swedish cities,
or to ride vintage mopeds through fogs of moths,
or to tremble in phone booths and feel the bones
under our faces, or to sit in trees and discuss
the entropy of snow, or to illuminate the city
with accumulation and lack of health insurance,
or to feel hummingbird and uncertainty, our flasks
full of fumbling and lightning, or to invent a machine
whose only function is to articulate the feeling
of sitting in a meadow knowing you are going
to leave the person you thought you loved,
or to never carry an umbrella when it rains
because as far as I know it always rains,
then I recommend a steady diet of fucked-up
hope until the ancient wrong that is really
a flock of disasters in human clothing
reveals itself to you as the harvest of wreckage
and incantation growing in the undergrowth
of everybody’s confusion. Do you understand
why any ambiguous desire, i.e. lemonade,
would lead to all this? Why I can describe weeping
as radiant? Why a cage made of syntax and sex
is where my heart lives with its little hands
tangling what I think I’m feeling into a large
audible error? I don’t need any proof! Religion
in the feedback—I don’t need any proof. Anything
beautiful will save you! Truth is too basic, I want it
baffling and static. Just lie down in the grass
with your soul full of swag. Inconsistent the glitch
I sound in my hoping. Do not expect a delay.
Expect wires kissing. Expect the day to spill electric
from the truncated shrine where our mouths
fumble and spill, where artillery is no longer kept
in the drapery, where each moment inherits
the momentum of brittle and raw arrangements.
The neck leaks louder, each move a mangled
Notice how the machine breathes and notice,
now, how close your teeth are to your tongue,
tongue that needs no warrant to magnify
the wound that is the formlessness of thought,
tongue drenched in accidental embroidery
from which the design of the machine splinters
into gesture and voice, is infectious in the fact
that our faces are not abstract, that we are
moving deliciously through our lives surrounded
by an influx of feeling in the blooming
people, the people who are my friends wearing
light on their eyes and lavishing one another
in irregular forms of benevolence in this language
in which I am constantly failing to say how much
I love you. You who wear hats and stumble
against concrete and vagary. Who disrupt
the system with one massive, eternal glass
of lemonade that glows and twists the whole
world art-shaped, the wind turning trees
into tonal blur, a thousand voices pushing
the machine through my veins as my friends
speak and sleep in the rain, umbrella-less
and trying, as the pulp and glint of the system
undergoes alteration with one shard of music
rising up from the golden surface of my friends,
let’s get free, let’s get free, let’s get free and feed
the machine our underwear and our birds
and our hands, all of which are both meaningful
and valuable because meaning and value
are unbearably soldered to the meat
of living, so that we have nothing but happiness
and the machine that eats itself and eats itself
eating itself as we move back into the world
making all these fucking mistakes, then
Neil Young, then lawnmowers atop our graves.
But no matter what the grass will keep growing.
The dictionary will cough up its harmonies.
Love will pour out of phonemes and machines
and I will stand next to you, a glass of lemonade
beside a glass of lemonade, and I hope
by then you and I will finally be friends.
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
Andrew Foster Altschul is the author of the novels Deus ex Machina and Lady Lazarus. His work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, One Story, Fence, and anthologies, including Best New American Voices and O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the director of the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University.
Cole Becher was a sergeant in a Marine Corps Combat Engineer Battalion. He served in Habbaniyah, Iraq, in 2008, and has a BA and MA in English. He misses a world without cell phones and reality TV, and Kar-dashian-esque anything. He does not miss officers, drill, or dust storms.
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of four collections of poetry, A Hunger, The Master Letters, Trouble in Mind, and, most recently, Stay, Illusion, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is director of poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jeffrey Cranor cowrites the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. He also creates theater and dance. He lives in New York.
Kyle G. Dargan is the author of The Listening, Bouquet of Hungers, Logorrhea Dementia, and the forthcoming Honest Engine, all published by the University of Georgia Press. He is originally from Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches at American University and directs the creative writing program.
Kathryn Davis is the author of seven novels, most recently Duplex. She has been the recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2006 Lannan Award for fiction. She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is Hurst Senior Writer-in-Residence.
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem, 50 American Plays, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Wish You Were Here, and 24 Hours. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is the poetry editor for Tin House.
Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer and critic. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and an editor of the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. She lives in Cairo.
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.
Joseph Fink is from California but doesn’t live there anymore. He spends most of his time making a podcast, and also has a novel coming out pretty soon.
V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel, Love Marriage, deals with Sri Lanka and its diasporas. The book was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of the best books of 2008 by the Washington Post. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, among other places. The recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Phillips Exeter, she previously taught at the University of Michigan. Next year she will join the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota. “K Becomes K” is a part of her forthcoming second novel.
Janine di Giovanni is an author and essayist and human rights activist who has reported war for twenty-five years. She has won many awards, including two Amnesty International Prizes and a National Magazine Award. She is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Ghosts by Daylight. Di Giovanni is currently writing a book based on “Seven Days in Syria.” In addition to Syria, she has worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Chechnya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, among other places. She lives in Paris with her son.