Book Read Free

Be Recorder

Page 3

by Carmen Giménez Smith


  just charge it to my race card

  •

  prose v poetry

  poetry v nation-state

  nation-state v my hoard

  my hoard v the dog

  the dog v the scorpion

  the scorpion v dirt

  dirt v lamictal

  lamictal v ennui

  ennui v blunder

  blunder v debt

  debt v defect

  defect v fucking

  fucking v instagram

  instagram v art

  art v weed

  weed v night

  night v the wimpy kid

  the wimpy kid v disquisition

  disquisition v testing

  testing v parallelism

  parallelism v your textual surface

  your textual surface v a glare

  a glare v balm

  balm v heat

  heat v talking

  talking v getting

  getting v the diurnal clock

  the diurnal clock v semester

  semester v my tender spirit

  my tender spirit v twaddle

  twaddle v our wreckage

  our wreckage v diagnosis

  diagnosis v committee

  committee v postfeminism

  postfeminism v perimenopause

  perimenopause v sentimentality

  sentimentality v television

  television v us

  us v apple

  apple v family

  family v flight

  flight v the bourgeoisie

  the bourgeoisie v torpor

  torpor v sunshine

  sunshine v your company

  your company v my duplicity

  my duplicity v your ease

  your ease v my programming

  my programming v your door

  your door v my puddles

  my puddles v progeny

  progeny v prose

  •

  do you remember

  the different world

  you wanted for your children

  glowing like a nominally capitalist eden

  and how good it felt to want the future

  a little less glutted with money

  because in those days

  we wanted to uncover

  and overturn I remember

  thinking it would be another

  world even better than the world

  made by the greatest generation

  sometimes so much better

  I was sure I couldn’t even imagine

  all of the ways it would be better

  esp. knowing this new world lived

  in the edges of my imagination

  and required connections into

  other people’s edges

  to make the whole world new

  and raw and hazy but delicious

  deeply in the marrow

  like the idea of Whitman

  or the snowy surface

  of the Virgin Mary filling me

  with hope when God was clouds

  and I was a young naïve nativist

  back then when immigration

  fueled the fantasy

  however improbable in ways we

  didn’t know but 100% sure

  we expected and back then I was

  sure believing that time’s march forward

  begat progress vis-à-vis US we would

  make it better for everyone

  then the they conceptualized

  how the idea of a once-better world

  would profitably merch hope

  and those robber baron’s dollar bills

  popped around like a halo

  and the they sold the latest gadget

  as panacea as lifestyle as campaign

  turning our hungry edges into an Oz

  machine for printing money

  so now we have less than our illusion

  less than progress only dregs and

  the machine of that illusion emitting

  toxins that’s the most recent thing

  •

  but mommy made me to disrupt

  at the hem of her apron weighed down

  by the coin of her labor she sold her grace

  for tips those days when you could

  subsistence live off coins or live almost

  a whole lifetime thinking your children

  would be lawyers not a why-tress

  rocket not candle so for her I hone

  myself into a thorn in the giant’s hand

  •

  we smear the map

  with pungency you want

  to swab us but you can’t

  making us more terrifying

  we coagulate and compound

  into a virulent fetid stream

  bisecting your dreams

  we’re those who aren’t there

  this land made us

  old phantoms

  •

  phantoms in the pantry

  and from the pylon

  and hiding in the cricks

  of history or Arnold’s

  phantom of yourself

  the West Side Story

  phantom and the phantom

  of sisters gone over

  the phantom of long-lost moods

  dense with speechlessness

  the phantoms of squashed ants

  and the off-course cricket’s dirge

  phantom dream trapped in your pillow

  the despair of these phantoms

  squared into bigger phantom

  splatter of phantoms against the spray

  their shadows above your bed

  phantom vessels in the sea’s hold

  the phantom of streaks in the window

  phantom of that recollection

  Aragon’s abstract phantom

  phantom sister

  why hast thou split

  into a cavalcade of phantoms

  for thou is purest idiom

  in my arsenal phantom

  infection clotting history

  with tattered machination

  the phantom of insistence

  living there in the bedroom

  and again in the kitchen the master’s

  spirit in the body’s fleshy ghost

  •

  Miss America from sea to shining sea

  the huddled masses have a concern

  there is one of you and all of us

  •

  I play anchorbaby-opportunist-influx

  and traffic my knack for accents and affects and for narrating

  childhood fraudulence into artworks

  and late at night I vanish into

  teacher mother housekeeper

  because who am I but a vortex of all those

  personas contra class traitor semi-invisible

  and forced into a figure defined by hurtling

  into ascension the past the present the lie

  the reality the parlor game the miniseries

  the battle older than me in my helix

  •

  the animal in the room hisses

  and bucks and her boom

  squeezes the whole foundation

  squeezing all the words out

  they twirl a piñata of George

  Washington’s head over the animal

  it’s filled with grenades of pomp

  and fake outrage just like the good old ’90s

  when the animal wrongly learned

  to avert her eyes tho she eventually

  disobeyed which led to pain and regret

  lo que no mata engorda

  you may have heard that’s

  what some did with it

  •

  and how did trifling bureaucracies

  lodge such a vast

  root in me

  I forget my real vocation

  not executive

  not supplicant but

  stepping back into daughterhood

  r
ehearsing insolence to blank walls

  the nay vote of the master’s discontent

  regaining consciousness

  inside of a bullet

  •

  in my revisionist chronicle

  a cabal of my favorite womxn

  run the show their hair a wild

  network of electricity charging

  the new grid and the categories of today

  consigned to a container shot into earth’s

  belly then cleave again and again into

  a giant ovum blood burst in the marrow

  of time a throbbing fold because it is

  all the body in fecundity and some

  switch restores connection and

  that’s as far as I get each time

  it’s a stunning light to see tho

  •

  isn’t progress

  such a chore when it’s

  for the other tribe

  sisters and brothers

  progress is also

  the sledgehammer

  for all monolith work

  one brick at a time

  •

  how shall we remind the mathematicians

  the politicians and the statisticians

  and the megachurch man

  and the gentrifying house-flipper

  and the executive-garbage people

  who hiked up the cost of Daraprim

  and EpiPen and the Ponzi scheme

  of senator-lobbyists and the propagandists

  and the executive branch-corporate shills

  and the patriarchal misogynist statesmen

  and the Tiki torch-khakis boys

  how shall we remind them that want is

  the conduit aversion the trick card and

  capital is the rabies and impulse

  is the fuel that drives it we reject getting

  jostled on currents or dismissed by judges

  or reduced to hot pepper or into migrant

  effigy or dismembered on borders

  and razed by the US appetite

  for Sinaloan meth in teeny baggies

  with skulls on them each a real

  human head tossed to the furrowed canals

  edging our border lined with the bodies

  of journalists and mayors a magical realism

  not seen in your mediating literature

  when do we stop layering with just post post post

  make it the gel we’re in will it have

  only symbolic heft or displace our bodies

  because of the cannibal factory

  releasing only one xenotype at a time free

  with purchase of one million shiny objects

  shall we write our demands in blood

  with our histories cures mythologies curses

  or should we develop a victor-approved

  version of history how do we transform

  their powers do we break them apart

  and bury them set them on the shelf

  do we push them out on the ice floe or take

  away their scepters can we disrupt it

  with our word parades or do we let them in

  on the plot or do we burn them

  •

  I have to prepare to live tight and court danger

  prepare to live on air I have to stop buying

  and watching have to learn to turn hate

  into light and uncover I think

  dance to disco from the ’70s oil crisis

  I have to pull my money

  out of the faux middle-class race

  I’m separated from my nation

  have to teach the kids to turn

  off the lights to compost shoot a gun

  and make agitational film

  resist the lure

  they will have to be tougher

  so I have to mine for toughness

  for me for the children

  for their middle age

  to accept it was long-coming

  long con

  tears are blood

  act accordingly

  have to overlook my invented

  horizontal rival remember urgency

  have to live against the wall

  into the future into the disturbance

  have to return to a marrow

  of language I have to refuse to be

  what they are to be what they’ll do

  will avenge will disturb

  revise and filter don’t want to

  still have to

  •

  this new disturbance

  could gather volition

  and mass humanist buy-in

  where I am alone and alert

  where I’ve thickened my soul

  by a severe scare quotes

  artist mastermind installed

  by the state to keep us docile

  and ashamed which we do for

  a hot second then stop and

  become presumptuous even while

  circled by junkyard dogs if it stops us

  we are weak if it shapes us we

  are what they name us

  •

  what is your origin where did you suffer what is your affinity group

  how are you acquainted with industry what will you bring to our guild

  what are the qualities of a good serf what is your mission in life

  and could you sell me this instance what is the last pornography that repulsed you

  can you talk about your research into the unsolvable how would you

  feign a diverse audience is a reader a client did customers occur to you

  as an outcome what are three positive strains in you does content

  drive you into the market does blunder drive you to work on a regular basis

  when can you start with selective memory is this the racket you had planned

  was this your natal force are you an open boomtown or a care professional

  what animal rules the roost does that animal work as aphorism

  pure revelation or dispatch from the front lines where is the monolith’s fortress

  and who is its benefactor have you made anything good with our outrage

  or built an endless abstract war will an underclass hunger qualify for your attention

  or will you have to track down their legitimacy yourself can I expect

  a chronicle of the moment or is it fraught with the lyric therefore fraught

  with the vulgar density of people is that the hitch aesthetically

  thus ethically does it seem impossible the desire for such validation

  or could you break free and record be recorder

  •

  let’s admit to our own complicity release into

  the wound because imagine it’s like a rose

  blossom of scarred red tissue not beautiful

  but layers and layers of lesions

  layered over with more scar then more wound

  over it and the edges are brittle from years

  and years of wounding can you see it red white

  purple orange yellow milk tears blue black

  the colors of everywhere so why can’t

  we circle the wound all of us circle

  it with balms and prayer with linked hands

  around it a common song in Esperanto for instance

  the resurgence of babel but as one braided

  bellow the rope that leads to heaven

  rousing the wound which could vibrate

  and diminish into lesser scar a release like opening

  a fist of morning glory but of broken skin like

  a giant fractal spreading across the ice

  it would be the end of one era the beginning

  of another like the end of money or the end

  of time except more difficult or impossible tho we

  wouldn’t televise or at least no commercial breaks

  we’d be taking off the masks and

  once they were off
and some folks might finally

  be in the seats we dreamt of when plotting

  this insurrection against the wound and for

  the animal the fiefdom might have been your aunt’s

  or your father’s and we apologize for disrupting

  lineage but from where I sit the seas and the deserts

  and islands are the source from which my sisters

  and brothers ascend in their ceaseless

  force and filled with light you go first then

  I’ll follow you say it and I’ll repeat it and you will

  repeat it and yours and mine and ours

  will repeat it and it’ll become the human drone

  over the world that trembles out the clouds

  tumbles them to wash over the cities wash

  out our mouths the consonance draining out

  into the sewers of our historical consciousness

  and the new city rises from the bits of what

  was the letters are shaped like us

  THREE • Birthright

  IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR LABORS

  What is the nature of the brown artist’s desire for disruption? My legacy: a long lineage of fuck-up hustlers, mostly on my father’s side. On my mother’s side: civil servants: three generations of accountants for the state. On my father’s: scamps, scam artists, pimps, criminals: perfect models for destabilization.

  From all sides: studious and intense labor, relentless work, under-the-table exchange.

  I’m a node of various dark and light powers, first generation emitting energy from the first world. In remembrance of their labors, honest and corrupt, I infiltrate the creative class by squatting in its traditions.

  This in remembrance of my impetuous mother and father’s jet plane ride into the ’60s maelstrom, and bussing tables and a tiny apartment in the Bronx and knowing only the English words for all-things-restaurant. I serve thee for thine labor is my staircase.

  The frivolity of poetry, layers of frivolity disguised as labor or vice versa. Poetry is useless until we rot from inside when we don’t have words.

  Emancipatory lyric poetry. Deregulated lyric poetry. Lyric poetry with workboots. The lyric poetry of garbage, of kitsch, of Marianism, of cockroach and placenta and dirty fingernails. In remembrance of their very deep-kneed and hand-gnarling labors, I declare the ocean Latinx, its blue surface the tongue of our abuelas forming the rough syllables of our Americanized ideals.

  In remembrance of my father’s belief in text, the house filled with books of striving. I devour the argot of the oppressor and US opened me in How to Win Friends and Influence People. My favorite story was about the boy who befriended a czar who then married the boy’s mother. It told me there would be a game.

 

‹ Prev