Love Pools
Flush and teenage
I begin life in a pool
Jump in with my dress
ballooning
Life opens this way
On a farm
That grows nothing
That keeps no animals
Driven by hunger
I jump in the pool
My hair radiant
To begin
In the beginning I am cold
for the hours after-birth
twisting in a towel
All the citizens know
the story of my birth—
Every pore weeping chlorine
& the weeping is golden
& the bits of gold catch feeling
The feeling catches in my mouth
& I keep it there
Every time, I gather these lights
they fall into my body
into unsure and slanted places
& they jostle as the pop songs do
Slam into each other, brakeless, body to body
& they rhyme nation to party
Durational testing the amphetamine of night
Floating under a jacaranda blanket
stitched with secret commentary
I dreamed your comment
citing a book and an author
I dreamed this parallel world
I birthed this author, I raised her, fed her,
I gave her a sister
I wrote her whole book
I wrote the comment and the cited passage
I dreamed of a you freely offering yr thought
I dreamed the thoughts mingled with the wet of the bodies
under the glowing blossoms
I woke up thinking
This was everywhere: a commentary of the sky
I soak in this infinity pool
a cascade’s unbroken loop
a beaded hole and thread
Is yr question a multitude question?
I feel it tangle the lights
I feel it pollinate hourly
The manyness coming up
That manyed mouth touches yours over time
Marking before now and after now and now and now and now
Possession
the ocean is a better kind of family
the short story is a kind of plate breaking
there’s a way of carrying a body only partway to heaven and then letting go
and the drop can be senseless
the way a room can disappear into embrace
the forger gathers all the air out of the room and claims divinity
the long con holds you under and you fill with salt, all stunned and blue
you confess to a narrative you think you’ve never heard before
this feeling is so new, you say,
all the lines of this split are radial
the secret interstices of where they eventually meet are where we lie
this illegal harbour
Cosmos
sometimes I eat moments
slowly like a red bean bun
& wonder if
we can finally have birds without dying
if this blanket pessimism
is necessary for collective liberation
if quietude is part of learning to love
or if I should be laughing more
my attachment has sesamed
a pattern so unconcerned it makes its own perfection
its own rivets
mid laugh swings
it enters me
does it enter you
Hold
death is political but our politics are not adequate
tonite all the ugly feelings
previously memorialized
return
like the earth is cut up
like fuck this migration of fear across and out from woundedness
like fuck state and capital and how nothing is for us
except this love, is something, and i don’t want that to be about containment
i want this too to be in excess, if the air is gonna bleed like this
let go, hold tight
