by Jana Prikryl
Copyright © 2019 by Jana Prikryl
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
TIM DUGGAN BOOKS and the Crown colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Selected material previously appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Brick, Critical Quarterly, Five Dials, Granta, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Provincetown Arts, Raritan, Subtropics, The TLS, and The Walrus.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Prikryl, Jana, author.
Title: No matter / Jana Prikryl.
Description: First edition. | New York : Tim Duggan Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043688 | ISBN 9781984825117 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PS3616.R538 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043688
ISBN 9781984825117
Ebook ISBN 9781984825124
Cover design by Elena Giavaldi
Cover photograph by Søren Solkær
v5.4_r1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Got
Anonymous
Waves
Real
Waves
Anonymous
Fit
Sibyl
Friend
Ambitious,
Greenpoint
Stoic
Waves
Asylum,
Anonymous
Vertical
Snapshot
Sibyl
Friend
Insta
Bowie
Salon
Fulcrum
Stoic
Bender
Anonymous
Shades
Waves
Candidate
Murder
2016
Sibyl
Prepper
Waves
Bräunerhof
Manhattan
Jeté
On
Santo Stefano Rotondo
Stoic
Friend
Anonymous
Inwood
Lady
Garden
Waves
Bob
Winter
Epic
Heights
Fox
Person
Friend
Anonymous
Sibyl
Snapshot
Coriolanus
Vertical
Stoic
Optimism
Anonymous
Sibyl
Dip
Binocular
Friend
Sibyl
Waves
Acknowledgments
About the Author
And when the parts disappeared their intelligent properties ceased being intelligent, and their unintelligent properties ceased being unintelligent.
—Daniil Kharms
(translated by Matvei Yankelevich)
Got
off a stop early but no harm.
A pleasant walk. This is a different place.
Lady at the counter doesn’t know it either,
no use asking.
Lucky you turned when you did
and saw the ceiling of the Brooklyn Bridge
not ten feet above. Never noticed
the whole thing’s umber, made of brownstone.
How same this town is, same as itself, unyielding.
It gives you time, almost, to make
observations such as this, it draws them out
like the East River pretending
to be a river when it’s merely an appetite.
I’ll take it from here, you think, I know the way.
Just barely convincing.
Then you saw St. Peter’s down below, confirming
this is Dumbo
and thought yes, finally they’ve made it right
with Malta: set forth on the long downward path
of sandy steps a touch too long and shallow
for human locomotion faster than deep reluctance
southwest, Spanish gravel, attractive, toward the church,
when houses along the way start exploding.
Anonymous
Her hair is parted in the center and this side
wall of the house ends just above her part.
The seam between the house and not-house
seems to rise out of the part in her hair.
Dandelions on the lawn are playing
sundials, their globes give out the time
of year. She’s not smiling so much
as grimacing against the pull of the brush
and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are
her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.
Waves
on the Hudson just a few inches
above the crown of my head, it’s fall but the leaves
as green as the afternoons humid,
they fall from the trees a halfhearted yellow,
unswayed by the unforthcoming change.
How you crossed that island I don’t know,
one of the blasts must have nudged you.
The Hudson is a river though, with genuine water
going one way most of the time, a true expression.
Not much else here, of the city I knew.
The doggerel place, a place you pray
to be delivered from through
not too much exertion of your own.
I designate the gondola
to Hog Island my second home,
may I get carried away in perpetuity.
Deliver me as down along a zip line—
these piles, these ornate cornices
best seen if not in enlargements of scenes
of Myrna Loy’s xmas eve between
martinis then through the blinds
of function rooms where hopefuls in colorless
uniforms circulate edible miniatures—
even if the view going down differs
from the view going up.
The city welcomes you.
The cathedral perhaps, its smoking dome
still visible over the charred fastnesses
of Village and East Village,
still visible when I turn.
And here we reach the shores of speculation.
Real
In which the studio
grows L-shaped, with an alcove
for the bed, you modest dream, in which the railroad
widens sideways, new door
a sudden wing ought to invade the brownstone
next door, but that brownstone loses nothing in the dream
i
n which another room
it’s huge, with grand piano and French doors
opening on a view of my private beach, why have I never bothered
going in this room before?
Those years obedient to time is money when
it’s space that’s time, every tenant diligently building out the common night
Waves
And the orderly whitecaps continue
pushing the weather to assert itself.
In hindsight the way those brownstones go off
in sequence seems quoted. If original
perception’s what you want, go
—In no hurry? Why,
there’s always a bodega with some bottles
of water left.
Bodega city, you tried thus
to pelt me with convenience in small ways
knowing the big conveniences would be withheld,
I think your effort was sincere.
I needed no Twix or bused-in muffins in
cellophane, but their availability everywhere
translated into a kind of human warmth.
Like human warmth, it was too much.
The pale skinny one had that aim
with punchlines that after an hour of shooting
things down I’m positive we—and later
waiting for a car a girl just as thin
and mean turned out to be his ex, I liked her
just as much, she could not hold it in
when I pointed him out, he’d be
married in three weeks. I laughed, happy
to just observe in this for most
second city, encamped between then
and then. Life would start another time,
meanwhile the capital always
another time, a constant prospect.
The girls I know look long and hard,
make lists, to-do, two columns
pros and cons.
Anonymous
The whitecaps blink like second thoughts
or action captured through a fledgling medium,
made sweet and anterior, already posthumous,
trinkets. A building of pale stone stretching out behind.
Stately, in other words.
Modillions between windows even at ground level and awnings pulled in.
Shadows short as a breath caught short,
midday.
To the right of these two, a third girl is centered in the center of the picture.
She seems to sway, making a window between her waist and that of the tallest girl.
We see through this window to a window behind.
But she leans toward the tall girl, cocks her head, and looks at you.
It’s the look of a friend who knows you well.
Fit
It’s the magnetic nearness to centers
of power that makes nearness a kind
of sameness and sends the needles haywire,
ordeal to just find a good tailor.
That Russian lady without
a huge amount of tact knew what to do
with a velvet dress the color of fire
bought on consignment and the handsome
Algerian near Tompkins Square
all hands-off deference carved
a linen dress three sizes too big to just
my shapes and knobs, and then I sent
my boyfriend there with a Hugo Boss
suit equally too big, and he hacked it
into something like a joke so that
was the end of that.
A shy person so razed
by the occasional leap beyond shyness that years
pass before she can smooth the bodice
of her dress down with both hands,
at last convinced being ridiculous
is not what they could accuse her of.
Shyness, not reserve—the reserved have less
to fear of what comes next,
the meadows, the shepherds
discoursing on the fitness
of the lobby of the Pierre for their
upland bivouacs—the reserved not only
sidestep facts but deal in forms
the shy find beneath them, scattered
about underfoot,
common.
Sibyl
I held a case
Sixth Avenue rewarded with a name for that undoing
walking up you turn left for west and right for east
that’s all the map there’ll be then
unfollow me
one of the most boring avenues
but then
but then all the avenues as a whole are more
because the streets are briefer, more self-possessed
remember?
I held a case
it was pre-war
I carried it onto the Avenue of the Americas
I went for coffee
this doesn’t chronicle the time I went
in one of the dozen identical cafés on Sixth
so you can take my word for it
so you can take my word for it
I also am all about abjuring abstraction
I wasn’t about to hand it off to anyone
not even you
listen
I’m no messenger
Friend
I said the wrong thing again but really meant it.
Her greatness threw me and maybe knew what I meant?
Benevolence of eminence I’m testing you.
You may not know when you are being tested.
You’re on your own to make the miracles ensue.
Nowhere is protagonism so supported.
She’s also alone but it’s not her first event.
Are you more alone when you have experience?
Her mouth queues up the taste of that covetousness.
It leads to nothing else than what it started as.
It’s criticism of books not art or music.
She’s still the harshest judge of her own sentences.
She shelters in my character analysis.
She gets me in a side hug till I’m homesick.
Ambitious,
i.m. Ellen Willis (1941–2006)
yes, likely story
again takes me in, full ride
comically uninformed
though I got St. Mark’s had long
performed itself, that little tea shop
named after a Stones song (a guy
explained it to me) I’d frequent
and pour my calories into making
rent but never really talk with Ellen
before she died—her silence, absolute
thrust my polite papering over my
silence into choking high altitude—
but when I went to work for Bob she said
distinctly there are things on earth
besides, what was her term
policy papers, that might not have been
her term—cut short, the city’s gone
simulacrum
Little York, every great
city leaves a little city in its wake,
even Troy had it done to it
and the hero as he passed
through most complimentary,
his way of nodding to
solidarity, that’s how he’d press
renewal out of those migrants of his
and something like this too
/>
was her philosophy, but I am forced
to pour it out, her half of tea
would be to sit in silence, undaunted
words for paragraphs although I hear
she had friends too, friends she spoke to
well knowing it’s no use telling
some things, they need situation
so much situation
the slant of land, tiny far-off crenellations
the need’s so great they build a Little Troy
like I keep trying to tell you
I moved here because he meant to
it tumbles out, slope or no, as when
no telling what you’d be
without the one born before you
Greenpoint
A siren was widely ignored
as we slammed the front door locked
and went out for ice and votive candles.
The houses cold as lined foolscap
in a rainbow of pastels were with few
exceptions on fire, the siren a kind of derrick.
But you could hear it all the way to Vinegar Hill
downstream or up, depending on the tide,
and as we strolled to the general store
for soy milk and to preorder half
a dozen linkboys for the night, we hoarded
our luck. St. Peter’s over the hill
was showing sculptures made
entirely from subway cars. We charged
our phones at the base of a traffic light,
