The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  NICK STURM

  I Feel YES

  FROM I Feel YES, a chapbook

  I climb into the machine and spend

  two days thinking about lemonade.

  I want to drink lemonade and watch the light

  disappear into where I am speaking.

  Language enters my life an infection in drag,

  my hands feeling plural as if they’re hands

  but also two or more kinds of vegetables

  grown in a country where the sky touches

  the distant mountains in a way that is

  both beautiful and meaningless, the clouds

  heavy static above the village where underwear

  dries on a log while a small, ageless girl

  stares at the words on a bottle of soda,

  not understanding the language though

  imagining she does, imagining a vast

  world in which this object has meaning or

  (which do you think is more important?) value,

  imagining the sun cut from the sky and

  kept in her pocket next to a smooth cold stone

  from the river where her brothers swim

  and nothing is digital, and even though

  lemonade is unheard of, a state of affairs

  that says little about my hands (what is

  there to say?), it’s good enough and happening

  and now here we are and I am glad. I feel

  like a birthday is a good reason to be naked.

  How about you? What do you think pleasure

  smells like? What is your understanding of

  the expression to make one’s hackles rise?

  I’m going to say now I’m not in control.

  My T-shirt could eat me—it just seems obvious

  but either way I’m going to ask you to dance.

  We’ll make smoothies out of rain and ride

  motorcycles through fields of what has to be

  commercially-grown lavender, how else

  could there be so much of it? I’ll tell you

  that many different things have the ability

  to glimmer and that is as much a reason

  for joy as for terror. Do you think of what

  you eat as having come from a carcass?

  Does part of you not believe yourself

  when you call it making love? Does it sound

  like I’ve been thinking about this for a long time?

  I’ll never really know anything and that’s

  why I’m on fire, helping my friend plug a tiny

  amplifier into the part of me that still believes

  I can wrap my disbelief in birds and bras

  and that will be sufficient, or at least loud enough

  to dance to without being aware of my body,

  which is always in the way because the physical

  world is determined by a range of parameters

  but what does that matter here? Why not say

  everything I feel? Everyday the sun paints me stupid

  and I’ve never been more thankful for anything

  than when my skin kisses up to oblivion

  in the middle of a parking lot and my

  strawberries spill out onto the pavement

  like they’re alive. Just look at all this! Our heads

  more expensive by the minute! I put on a blue coat

  and walk into the kingdom. I stand in a puddle

  for twenty-five years. I stand in a puddle

  and for twenty-five years I am barely born.

  Now, stained and weightless, I order Chinese food

  in the dark. I watch a video of people

  taking off their pants in public. I watch a video

  of a video of a lion eating an antelope.

  I don’t want to understand, I just want

  to know you can hear me. My heart is pure

  but I didn’t say that. I’m just a bastard

  cloud confusing the light, a stupid hunk

  of ones and zeros trying not to not

  foul up the wires. I’m stranded on the edge

  of the electorate cooking my hands

  in their own juices. I want to be delirious

  as a cheerleader full of candy! To express myself

  in increasing wolf. I want to rent out

  your respiratory system with my airwaves.

  Call me a man and I’ll fill you with mixtapes

  until you dance the feedback out of me.

  My actions are excessive! Ice cream in Belarus!

  October in a tree! Some precise blur

  instructs me. That’s how I wrote this,

  hovering above the desert in a motionless vessel.

  I put a giraffe in a boat and laugh.

  Thinking about it isn’t going to help.

  Somewhere near me my inbox vibrates.

  I don’t have any business. I feel emotional.

  I’m wasting my time. How many ways can I say

  something wrong. There’s piano skin

  on my windowpane! Gravy sticking out of the night!

  My multitasking awash in tapestries of light!

  Revelation is ubiquitous, McNuggets in the grass.

  I’m trying to live better, and many other things.

  Every spring the meadow in its hysterical dress

  and I all human and delusion. I vow through

  the brouhaha with a temple in my fingerprint.

  I vow through midnight with a swan

  in my bourbon. I vow orgasms and antlers.

  I vow to get up. And I do. But who am I

  kidding? I’m not in charge. I mimic

  the noise of insatiable flowers. I dress up

  like a meadow and pretend I’m the world.

  When I speak it is the opposite of bones.

  Real life bones, my name on my hands.

  I understand now, the valley full of brains.

  Let’s have a conversation using only our skin.

  Here I’ll start where I’m lonely and wet.

  I will never be as good as the snow

  breeding in the clouds and the world

  eating the snow as it falls around the birds,

  the real life birds that are ridiculous tools,

  the real life birds that should be arrested

  but are not, and the birds in the machine

  as it hums and humans and the humming

  now a kind of snow that builds and hums,

  humming into the world that is a real life bird,

  a bird a machine inside a real life word,

  a word a totem of inarticulate grammars and grammar

  a bird that should be arrested but is not. I just want

  to be simple and hanging out a window with my hands

  in the sky. To never die, that is the nature of

  the machine, the machine that is only fog

  between my fingers, the idea of a lake

  emerging from the idea of rain, the idea that

  I can say something and you will hear it.

  That is how I know I am here. Here with birds

  and stupidity and pieces of weather. Here where

  I drive around all day in the blue light revolving.

  Here where I speak in the shape of other humans

  speaking. Here where I compare life to an avocado

  and the university trembles! I drink lemonade

  next to a whale. I drink lemonade and migrate

  into a system of becoming. I drink lemonade

  and establish relationships based on love

  for things that are invisible, or in other words,

  faith, which, along with stupidity,

  is what brought me here thinking

  about lemonade in the first place and

  if I had to conceptualize what I mean

  by “first place,” which is an expression

  that denotes a temporal sequence

  in terms of an abstracted spati
al structure,

  the beautiful thing about what I would say

  is that I never knew that just thinking

  about lemonade would get me here

  like how when I pull a bag of oranges

  out of a dumpster and make juice from them

  and I’m drinking it I think about the person

  who works for the grocery store who decided

  to throw away that bag of oranges or who

  was ordered to throw away that bag of oranges

  because of the rotten orange at the bottom

  and how when that grocery store employee

  absent-mindedly, or perhaps not, perhaps

  with a high degree of awareness, tossed

  that bag of oranges into the dumpster that

  person would never have imagined another person

  ever touching those oranges again, let alone

  eating them, and then I think back

  to the truck that delivered the oranges

  and the person who drove that truck and

  how they might have touched these oranges

  not thinking of them as oranges but as

  only some materialized idea of the continual

  struggle to understand how to live while

  also working and doing something meaningful or

  (which do you think is more important?) valuable,

  and then I think back to the building

  where the oranges were sorted and stickered

  and bagged and back to the first truck

  that took the oranges from the orange grove

  and the people who picked the oranges

  with their lives and the things they love and hate

  and their thoughts when they read the news

  and their lips and bedrooms and hands,

  their hands always smelling of oranges,

  which may or may not be meaningful or

  (which do you think is more important?) valuable,

  and their orgasms, shared or not, and how this

  incongruous system of human and nonhuman motion

  could lead to this bag of oranges in a dumpster

  without any mouth to take in their architecture,

  without these oranges satisfying some need, some

  basic, universal, almost tangible need to know

  that our existence is purposeful, which is often

  the way one feels sitting on a park bench holding

  a single orange barely caring what happens,

  and how the breakdown of such a system is

  something we all have to account for in our own ways

  and how writing this poem feels like that,

  confusion coupled with action mixed with some

  vague hope that we’ll somehow get somewhere,

  which is why I climbed into the machine at all.

  Then as long as we’re here together let’s agree

  there be no knowing in the making, a knot,

  that it show how in the motion, the machinery.

  Let’s agree that the only thing shared by nations

  and snow is that no matter what they touch

  they always disappear. Let’s agree that if I took

  a picture of your face right now and later showed it

  to a stranger they would say Who is this beautiful person

  I do not know? and I would say I do not know

  because I do not pretend to know you, I only pretend

  to speak. And let’s agree that in the light

  making its way quietly through the valley

  there are noises no one knows exist that communicate

  nothing and are never repeated and in that light

  there is one perpetual question every person

  and poem exists to answer, essentially

  what’s so hard about being happy being

  in awe of everything? I need to believe

  I would suffer to save you. Amidst cell phones

  and bar glass kissing and smashing my face sentimental

  for better or for worse or for even better, galloping

  full of wine into the parade, removing the plexiglas

  between our bodies and our bodies, and our bodies

  discovering what they mean when they say

  “I am in love with an emergency of symbols!”

  What part of a moose don’t you understand?

  What would it take for you to take off your pants

  in public? What if I took off my pants right now

  and laid down in the grass, if we could find any,

  and in an unsexual way asked you to join me?

  Is that even possible? What part of the question

  do you think I’m referring to and what do you think

  I mean by “possible”? I generate hogwash

  in my torso! The proper use of a hammer

  is to wear a petticoat and be inconsistent!

  A feverish joy scatters into the citizenry!

  Isn’t this what’s supposed to happen

  going from meaning to meat to mouth?

  The president stands naked in the middle

  of the forest! I make sandwiches

  for everyone who hates me! After that

  what happens is made of fucking flowers.

  I look out my window at the light

  licking snow off the dumb bodies of air

  conditioning units and finally get a grasp

  on why everything I love is so leaving.

  Why something in a word out of its body

  makes me feel everywhere as air, air that lives

  in mouths and birds all peach pie and dynamite.

  All genetic ballistics in the begonias. I am

  the first person ever to touch this tree and for this

  the thing that is the word that is my soul

  is happy. I mumble into the incredible.

  I kiss the idea of peace and give in to feeling

  vulnerable despite what’s foreign about my teeth.

  Believe me I swear what I mean when I’m lying.

  I want to cuddle until our bodies go

  gossamer. I want to know how much gasoline

  it would take to get me and all my friends

  to California. I want to know what would happen

  if instead of gasoline it was lemonade and instead

  of California it was the kind of sky that happens

  over California and instead of the sky over

  California it was just me and you and a bag of oranges

  astonishing our faces. It has something to do with

  how I want to build a symphony for breakfast. How

  I’m angry at clouds. How sometimes I imagine

  my credit card laying in the muck at the bottom