by Tommy Pico
FEED
TOMMY
PICO
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Me n Leo yakkity yak yak’d
about writer’s
block
and the starchy long stroke of quote unquote God on the Meadow Walk and he didn’t know I was fully head over banana peels I mean in Kiehl’s I mean in straight up crappy love with him yet and maybe I didn’t either? Sand crabs poking their bodies & legs post wave Hindsight
is Good & Plenty I mean 20/20
clearly
the worst American
candy And what is candy, but a crush?
Leo said it’s tangled up
in waves in dreams in therapy That writer’s block
(or is it god?)
comes from being blocked up
in other parts of the days
of our lives
of our lives
of our lives
This is a polysaccharide Effective deflection
Rejection heavy,
that he’d forgotten what the feeling
of a good
idea is
But I’m standing right in front of you?
I thought bubbled but never troubled
the air
with my utterance
Instead I said, “this is the part where you ask me for my number”
because I was committed
to being my own damn romantic
comedy that year—
Our sublime times The Don Julio margarita mix of our situationship
These are the Doppler blips
that ripple resurface
when Leo surfaces among the Chelsea Thicket
Optimal frustration from the Odysseus years Golden Fleece of
intimacy
for the first time in like what
6 months?
A year?
Two years?
Seven years?
Has it been SEVEN years? 1492? It was literally 69 billion years BC
Dear reader,
White as a bell you whisk me to a fever
like the ruby cinnamon—Hey! Let’s make a vinaigrette
Did you know molasses emulsifies the olive
oil and keeps the little
fat
molecules from stumbling
into each other, thus allowing the oil and vinegar
to mix?
A sauce is broken when the oil separates
like a heart
Sometimes this is inevitable, no matter how hard you shake the mason jar
A bumble bee’s tiny hairs curl
THE EPA’S PLAN TO CENSOR CLIMATE CHANGE DATA
in the electric field
of a flower
and the seasons and the fields sway
their harvest like a rolling
sea
The city cabin-fevered in the wake of winter, Sherlock & looking glass
(it’s a gas, gas, gas)’d for an excuse
to wear an eyebrow lift of shorts again
I don’t know what this flower
is called
but in the breeze
it looks like a butterfly on a string The dependably wild
inconsistencies of spring Now the city
keeps a sweater in its backpack—Balance
is not unlike how rice and beans shouted “You complete me!” in the crowded train station millions of years ago. Dice the leeks. Snap off
the inedible ends of the asparagus
Salt/salt/salt until you can angel in it
Wilkes: How do you feel?
She swipes a curl from her face, blows out a swirl of smoke and bangs
ashes into my baby cactus
Me: Like someone put a sleeve of dry pasta up a mouse’s urethra?
She didn’t ash into my baby cactus. I just like the way that sounds. We’re on her fire escape overlooking the belly garden of all Brooklyn apartment buildings. The day was in the low 60s but we’re in the high weeds. She ashes between the irons. Her landlord is back there, pulling plants and sucking her teeth.
Wilkes: ASH HAPPENS!
she shouts down. The landlord shakes her head, says something low and out of range.
Wilkes: I mean about seeing Leo again
Me: Everyone is talking about the Fermi Paradox right now, you know what that is?
She hands me the spliff. I hold it eye level, staring at the ember raveling the white paper black and grey before crumbling away
Wilkes: Of course! I wrote the book on Farm Socks!
She rolls her eyes and lifts her palms up.
Me: It’s like, against the infinity of space and all those stars and all those worlds out there, the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations other than us is extremely high. But where are they? Even if interstellar travel is really slow, our sun is relatively young compared to the age of the universe as a whole. They’d have had millions of years to get here.
Wilkes: I think it’s paternalistic to assume we’d be demonstrably visited in our lifetimes. History basically just started recording itself. They could have come a million years ago and been like, this rock is trash!
If . . . you’re not gonna smoke that? Pass, plz
Nations are always outlived by their cities
Dear reader,
We are in a pot.
One of us is the vegetables and one of us is the water. I can’t tell who is cooking who, like a late 80s Aretha Franklin song—we give ourselves up to each other. Into each other. Throughout each other. I THINK whoops I think that exchange is what Beyoncé bards about in “XO,” her love song to the crowd
Track 1: “XO” by Beyoncé. The part where she looks out into the crowd and assures them, they are what she needs. That she gives them everything. It doesn’t deny finality. Love, then lights out. It simply identifies the grain of performance is her feed.
I’m going to keep this short
and sweet bc I am tall and BITTER:
There’s a kind of stability
There’s a kind of stability
There’s a kind of stability
being so thoroughly Teebs I mean seen
A sly calm, indulging the part of you that stays when the rest hides or hurricanes away onstage. Another tug of skin on my skin, firming everything in place
Dr. John says anxiety of the return is necessary. Conclusion
must come for a new story
to take place
Track 2: “We Need a Resolution” by Aaliyah. The part where you reach the critical juncture of whether the relationship can be salvaged. Do I change? Do you change? Do we go on the same? Hurt is inescapable here. This resolve dissolves the doubt: We need to talk it out. Evasion writ large: The reason why we don’t have the conversation is because we’re afraid we already know the answer.
Dear reader,
I’ve been thinking about fuel sources that produce the heat of the fire that burns inside you and the term “resistive circuit” and active networks and mainly about Kirchhoff’s current law, that the sum of all currents entering a node is equal to the sum of all currents leaving the node by which I mean it’s pollen season again and it’s got my circuitry inconsolable and the City stopped texting me back which, wtf I’ve never been ghosted on by a whole City It’s very men TFW you want the City to know you hate it, but also like it doesn’t even occur to you to think about the City—Wait who are you? Ooh yeah, yr whatever anyway I’m having the Baja fish tacos you shd go to shell Sorry I mean have the macaroni I hear it’s Wait a minute who are you again? I’m talking to the freaking reader can you give me a minute jfc
I’ve been thinking
a lot about stretch denim
that doesn’t also have a stretchy waistband
(by which I mean nature’s cruelest disagreements)
and I’ve been thinking
about the slobbering of heat that is the promise of spring.
In her book An Everlasting Meal Tamar Adler,
waxing poetic on boiling cauliflower,
writes, “Heat is a vital broker between separate things.”
In the insanely popular early 90s alternative rock banger “Linger,”
Dolores O’Riordan sings, “If you
if you could return:
don’t let it burn.
Don’t let it fade.”
Today, to wear out the woozy, to giddy the skittish dizzy into a steady
simple rush of stillness I buttered
around the city listening to The Cranberries
as the air around me bounded
into its summer self
but literally two weeks ago there was a blizzard
that thawed into a song.
Springtime is so insecure, right?
But at least we know where it’s heading Fiery
lion I lay no claim on but whatever memory lies all the time
[in three voices, like a braid: Gansevoort Woodland]
Appalachian red, Cercis canadensis; SER-sis kan-uh-DEN-sis
gray birches, Betula populifolia; BET-yoo-luh pop-yoo-lih-FOLE-ee-uh
dogwoods, Cornus florida
Are you an introvert or an extrovert? he whispers blacklight
blackout
as his bitty big balls bounce
against the throat
of my taint
(by which I just mean my taint)
Dear reader,
I am a hoar on a book tour and traveling
is so romantic, ain’t it? An ode
that bodes of dynamism
and gutter sluttery. Glittering sea
of one night stand and
kick
stand
dicks
Camel Blue ash and pit stain tees
ALEXA–SIRI:
(What time does Panda Express open?)
Panda Express, I mean James Brown, is dead
Crowbar kraken awake every fire hydrant
on every corner
of every city
block
and mainline that shit into my veins.
I’m planted
in mustard-yellow slip
ons at the waterfront
of a new city made of mustard
greens, metaphorical tether ball water features
and a literal city.
SEPTA. Charm City Circulator. MBTA.
I’m sprouting
a pink tank
top
at the bus stop of a new city
made of absinthe bird
sanctuaries, metaphorical troll doll jewel belly
t-shirts
and literal
britches.
I mean bridges.
El train. Amtrak. Trolley.
I’ve grown
spray-on skinny
high waisted acid washed old-fashioneds
at the hotel bar
in a new city
made of tucked in black Wayne’s World t-shirts
(oh dream weaver)
and literal roundabouts.
the MARTA. the Marc. the MAX.
Track 3: “Alone” by Heart. The part where she expresses doubt about being able to confess her feelings to the lover, and wonders at what point she’ll be able to get the lover away from all others, “Alone,” in order to unload.
Portland Oregon is a bunch of white ppl in a brew pub whose name is two random nouns like Sage & Mortar or Whimsy + Pickles or Straw and Freddy Krueger Glove Expectant
faces expecting
me
to smile back. I don’t do that.
Portland Maine, the other white Portland, is a bunch of full leg pants
and poly pan-
sexuals
Tonight I am pierogies
Ross Pierogies
Beer battered fish tacos and jalapeño corn
bread Aloe lavender under-eye nipple goops
Obsessively checking my bank balance
and vocal rest
stop
in Connecticut
that has a Sbarro, a pick n mix candy store, a Taco Bell AND Chipotle:
Proof that linear time is a gd sham
Once, I wrote about being ancestrally from a desert
that drought made me restless
searching for a nourishing territory
You know how some people
are “all that”? Well I’m all appetite Hunger pang
an ambulance
siren speeding to another needy feeling
The vernal bend rendering the cell walls softer, pliable without fully
spilling into each other
Shall I be a poem for you?
I mean, I used “shall” tbh
me af
the human condition smdh
the bible lol
bibliosexual wtf
the library iykwim
No territory will ever satisfy me
af
SAVE OUR COURTS! SIGN THIS PETITION!
Dear reader,
A roux, I’ve learned tonight in this midcity dinner party apartment tucked somewhat safely away from asthmatic LA freeways, is the mixture of butter and flour used to swell sauces and soups and Paul’s baked sage mac n cheese that I’m whisking alive like an al dente Evanescence cheese-rock bop. Whistle while you whisk away the rage scrunched in yr boulders. I says to them around the table I says—
I don’t have a food history.
If the dish is, “subjugate an indigenous population,” here’s an ingredient of the roux: alienate us from our traditional ways of gathering and cooking food.
Kumeyaays moved around what wd be called San Diego County with the seasons. The mountains, the valleys, the coast. Not much arable land or big game so we followed the food wherever it would go.
Then the missions. Then isolated reservations on stone mountains where not even a goat could live. Then the starvation. Then the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. Whatever the military would throw away came canned in the backs of trucks. The commodities. The powdered milk, worms in the oatmeal, corn syrupy canned peaches. Food stripped of its nutrients. Then came the sugar blood. The sickness. The glucose meter goes up and up and up.
I says to them around the table I says, I don’t have food stories. With you, I say, I’m cooking new ones.
Being protective
of yr recipes is only natural. Things get stolen.
Cousin dies, some overdose, and another cousin
has a daughter Incel man
plows
into ppl w/a truck in Toronto mostly women
and there r something like 70 million
more men than women in China & India and
Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
a new metaphor, except it’s not
a metaphor A literal part of his
heart
has died
says the echocardiogram
he got before starting a new med
but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
salads and “Mamihlapinatapai” is the most precise
word according to linguists
from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
something like when you leave a café bathroom and want to tell the
next person in line it wasn’t you who took the smelliest dump in
American history but you keep walking I mean
the word is more like when two ppl look
at each other and the look
is that they both
know
what the other shd do but neither
wants to initiate How in Kumeyaay, “howka” means “hello” but more
like I see the fire that burns inside you A whole caravan of meaning in a
s
ingle word and Wilkes
after twalkin bout her non-invasive surgery
says John Krasinski, at 6'3, is the shortest of three
brothers the others 6'8 and 6'9 and I start to
pal-
pi-
tate
My back arches so hard I snap in half
on the Link light rail on the way to drop
off my stuff at Rich’s in Cap Hill
b4 checking in w/Colleen b4 my reading at Mount Analogue
at ZZZ Space and IMAGINE BEING
THE MOZZARELLA IN BTWN THAT FUCKING SLICE
OF BAGUETTE R U KIDDING ME 6'8 and 6'9
I NEED TO BE IN A SMALL CLOSET IN A SHOE
BOX APT IN THE CUT OF THE STICKS
LIKE TOTALLY ALONE SUFFOCATING
INTO A PAPER BAG and Jess texts
me she’s got a mass inside her the size
of an orange she’s going under next
week and I’m practicing
lines
for when I officiate Becky’s wedding some kind
of grand
metaphor abt the golden
hour A dappled kind of time when the sky is stained with more color than it has at any other time of day such that light bursts through everything Everything glows Everything haloed with light Everything looks like a memory A kind of waltz with impermanence and supper bells and time When even dust and clouds, those dull greys, reflect the magic of the father of the sky When the angle of the sun to the horizon means the light has to pass through more of Earth’s atmosphere and that compact of atmosphere filters out the blue hue light normally emitted by the sun, giving the hour its soft and golden name That light, that sliver of golden light, is light unlike any other light you’ll ever encounter—and that completely saturated natural light can’t be replicated by anything else Nothing we’ve ever made can come close to that glow Not a filter not a software not a bulb When you rise who you have been raised by, all the people who have angled and passed through your life and loved you and gave you shine to make you into this person A gathering of circumstances that produced the light of you right now in this moment & someone tells me “You shd wait
five yrs in btwn publishing
books like what’s
the
rush?”
and I’m like did u not just read? My cousin died today
and he was only two years older
than me and it’s been this way my whole
life like biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinch
I would LOVE to imagine
being alive in five
years but I have these bones u know?
and just like that I’m writing
a poem
a poem
a poem
again
The ephemerals big bloom