by Farid Matuk
the masquerade against the progressive ideology of the panorama who’ll ride into a future
slipping into and out of the white parts of men trying to save women and the world putatively
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
exposed to meet the lubricious demands of the male spectator and yet always confoundingly
and performatively surplus negotiating and traversing astride the very moment of exposure
I would sit naked and would write and by my means I would sit to write and would leave
my shoes open near the window given to its wasteful passing knowing the tugging at my door
was the wind pushing out as I would stage it flying into dissolution and that if the bigger house
came next I’d have our man bring the car around stripped of badges murdered out in fields
pima desert cotton chorusing a comfort of brotherhood sans sisterhood or brotherable things
still the background would roll past the windshield interrupted by gracious marks migrating
under no discernable hand I would step into the stall built up around the toilet I would
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
take the porcelain figurine attitude of the feminized masculine or the masculinized feminine
punch line of my given type sitting on the toilet where there is no toilet reading the superficial
estimations on holidays I would open a panel on my back to receive the carbon powder
packed tight by a special implement and upon a flame turning at the long end of a safety match
I would burn the powder inside with a share of flux drawing its impurities ashing it in reams
of dense rope from my porcelain hole for those still looking and I would know by my intuition
rope would collect in a spiral rising on this day when I would have an intuition finer by a day
when you asked where’s my pink Barbie horse at the wiped counter in the kitchen is she pretty
I thought of Mr. Hands bleeding out after taking an Arabian stallion and it’s not done with me
you say pink plastic in the sky in a windstorm I see livid high-gloss plastic some artist molded
as outsized pill capsules like fast medicine sparkle colors draw saliva out first as if wide eyes
were made always available letting fly the blond crystal mane into the air all down the year
the documentary said it took a friend in the scene to learn his name decorated in the stickers
that came with it so it’s totally the company’s fault and men’s fault with appetites for a self
gone into ready eyes or for friendly sex that would put consent into the air to be increased
when our drive goes right past the horse track’s delicately arched brutalist concrete we’re still
in bodies we don’t have to own to care for what the foreground rolling back leaves them to be
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
if so many once straddled dirt bikes in nylon shorts thinning at grown eyes come to wrap us
in being seen who should want the freedom of seeing a toy horse and thinking Mr. Hands
come down live again with a faith in all the obviousness of form Mr. Hands you’re not done so
sing Mr. Hands gonna get fucked tonight Mr. Hands gonna get fucked tonight Mr. Hands
gonna join a chorus called a tradition of saying of the horse as of the adolescent
bear in a tree in the square it’s just nuisancing for a study of relative values
so when the whole afternoon’s air falls into a flat white light at the classroom’s
glass spur its pane rolled back from any impression straining at its lead inviting
the lame question who’s walking whom that’s when I most want to ask after a right
to kill the bear so later you might go shameless sensing for yourself and still judging
the pull of walking out onto a field where small European rooms Bataille or de Sade
stand their frames even if we can go there to feel just like whites with good shots
and with our own hunting guide to bend and open over the dead bear’s warm fur for
and with a second guide who holds the phone taking the video to its generic failure
and the first again cheering “Shake that bear, shake that bear” claims for those of us
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
still looking ecstasy as a mourning that substitutes animals and positions if one day
you look too you shouldn’t have to abdicate a place because it’s legal only means
it has a trace a small but given perch from which to assess the practice of a practice
period ecstasy if we’re going to stand around in the names when we could join those running
into a cousin’s fields letting the contemporary fall away if the gauge is right of the nails
binding the soles to the leather I like the enamels and glazes the animals get painted in
flight as much as the animals and if you’re of critical importance to some vision of the future
know nobody wants to play the North but it’s not like they’re not trying to win farbee farb
far be it from them to criticize but they don’t invite spectators to the books telling you
what you just walked out of is history in all time rushing isn’t the call but it sends you
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
summarized at the inside of a snout mask playing pretend along the reservoir’s tourist edge
where we take our walk successful neoclassical sculpture comes to poses plastique
powdering live bodies naked white or in body stockings white to look like Parian
porcelain so we could look on something like Gibson’s Tinted Venus and see realism
itself running if the unprofessional form moved a whiteness enough to get to be a border
on the other side take the grown looking and staging for a gauge of how some would bear
staying discreet in a body as a magic in whiteness they’ll say you want your share
in the lay of the scrub grass I see wind’s circuitry amateur videos having run in my pocket
documenting a scene is the name of the next song if expanding beyond dyads into a finite set
hardly shames the looking or the scurrying in the scrub grown folks hear as a mouse or a pair
of long-tailed birds in those positions when their noise is most in the shape of their outlines
feeling so low in our asymptomatic infections gone unmanaged by the agencies so base
gooning our grown faces so hard at the low words they spoke back to us in waves on noise
eyes on wide and say come what may inside the box or under its pall written asunder I mean
we know everything standing beside what bright and nimble forms to have been of the class
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
that was the happiest among our types to have been raised to have thought a condition
might lay out to an edge to have fit our le
gs into jeans and our bellies into shirts and our
wrists into watches to forget the things we did to invite the wind through the house
and now say the ghost tugs at our door to have been called a bitch just cuz we kissed
the white noise from a line of navigators frenzied things to have set an aim for our eyes
to have drifted to have been possible in a flattening of relations so they lay for your regard
they were little things in demands and performance reviews we did to make wall and sky sway
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
about you as something that wasn’t continuous fair intellect lunging so fast at ugly certainties
A Daughter That She May Touch the Deployments
Among the air assets housed at the local Air Force base are eighty-three A-10C ground attack planes, fourteen EC-130 Airborne Battlefield Command and Control Center planes, five HC-130J personnel recovery carrier planes, and a contingent of F-16 fighter jets. As part of the United States Air Combat Command, the base maintains these planes ready for deployment.
you play at slapping us hard enough to get in trouble
I don’t know what I speak this into at any of your ages
some men in particular will think to fuck you
already do “so unaccountable, so unreasonable, and what is usually
called so unnatural” is how Sojourner had to allow as an exceptional rule
what was given to her white woman owner whom you could have been
I mean we gave you your body and didn’t change everything
like the general “shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch”
that Harmony wrote to her dad about after he died makes me think to wield
me and my types down onto my value if that presses its point into a hole
where one day you could drop words down through this house
arranged about the reading chair where we had a matron screaming
hard at her husband drunk in the street painted on a retablo
what good impressions it might make to allow nothing
and live screaming so composed when they say you’re the prize
it may start to get worse when you turn nine not having anything
to do with you except you’ll be in there bearing your body
a screen for pictures among historical materialists something
like I was bearing the hard dicks of passengers across my small arm
my head resting on the bus window the smell of rain from the bus stop
putting out a little ammonia but on Speedway today we can say anything
like rain smells good falling on the sign for Girls Girls Girls
or that posed open lipped available tree trimmers carve through the medians
this morning big in their work calling out on what flat blue air
approaches you to be noticed what doesn’t get staged on ambiguity itself
calling for a border or a hem brought round one sadness
is that you pick a dream and you are following
our daytime running lamps and metals in the sun
or you couldn’t name the tree or its bird
or that one camera doesn’t know about dignity
a little distance
to carry in time you come to us on any horizon in the house
zoo otters we saw in that pleasure gather a crowd oiling about each other
casually you kick my groin pinch your mother’s nipple in sleep and suckle
what feeling your fingers root up into a top hat and tails to sing “Nobody
no time” if you want your voice to trill at least a little ways
under what we’re supposed to be we won’t waste one ripple
on that water my grown friends afford the pills they trade
to feel like this every day every night the car clean garaged
in seasons when this valley’s dust repeats with what we call luck
and a light touch on the tops of trees that didn’t ask to be on the same street
will you grow to stage in touch what your skin would bear in
from surface waters down into flesh edged in its lower courses
go agents that would prepossess your form I mean even the air
is thick with men bearing mirrors for men each the other’s babies
pressing down with a faith in all the obviousness of form
do words arrive in flesh then flex a centimeter more
when you’re older and read this at 10:13 the good news
of the morning’s floor is that it’s boring under the light
loosed ends to meet it sloppy or clean a thing
using itself wastes not want
even if we’re bred migrants running back in generations
none of us knowing what animals cross the path to the reservoir
wondering about the gaze about your mouth
about killing us trying to draw a giraffe will your little head
return to the idea of a fish that in its hunger mouths how to be free
whether we call it free or don’t and slip along the small rocks of the trail
our hands catching would smart from each impression
in our palms for some time taking up our places with us
announcing that echo off the sides of the people we’ve been to get here
and I don’t know time is now smeared across the dove
mocking chickadee and cardinal calls all through this morning
I present myself spread over the words it matters
who does what and over their promises I got used to this country
gathering a people where we are now once a week at the park
rent a field bring some tea and all the adults would just watch the kids
so we might believe pleasure a techne for arraying ourselves
along some absolute bearing’s deviating norths
we’ll make a fire tomorrow
how many names could they have the eye beaters blind kids James used
I want to defend them from his program
the kids punched their little fists right into their eyes to flash a light
against the walls of their brains the poet wanting us prime
to really see us in the credit in our wallets when we visited
the nerve of the poem trying to be our blind face
we’ll make a fire tomorrow you see if I just write what I know
I won’t use anybody is part of the fantasy of being discreet
in a body as a claim to life maybe the kids beat their eyes
to learn “A New Rule in Algebra. Five from Three
and One remains!! or, The Three Mexican Prisoners
having but one leg between them all” suffering the sameness
arching your little body as the lines of fish swimming say anything
a one-legged three-bodied thing can still dance put its foot up
on the dais on the table stink up the halls of my legislature
can ghostwalk as you line up over the sets of potential turns you can use
the sets of possible intents your numbers of legs of glands
of gums of waters of hard edges everybody can draw says the artist
California oak fungus in the wind keep checking the hole to find the hole
work and sex being funny if I look off to the side in homes in videos
where the agents try to come clean grouped cheering each other’s instances
happy to meet the camera as bodies handling what they want
handling me as a young thing
in their mouths in their cars
then thanks I have to go home for dinner I’d say the sidewalk
brightening out West far into space I wanted to carry that feeling
into the critique of feeling seeming to layer the white
onto protected things the Air Force transport works a little harder into the wind
making a rushing withdrawal like listening inside my first Walkman
that needed first a commons echoing my smell crowded walking
or cycling well above groundwater and so far above us
an unusual compass of voice taking the A above the staff and holding it
for fifteen seconds in an immodest display listening
your mother wrote “three whistles invoke a junction” where sly
or guileless crouched onto a platform singing to a street cat
the story of your soul the ghost of an Aleppo ballerina
might discover you white or is it patriated and protected enough
to not start out exposed but even with that bit
in my mouth I can’t get us to an answer for Anne asking
after her operation something like under the sign of what body part
used up or cut off or flayed can a daughter finally “be unavailable”
to whatever various slants of porn light would try to share or foreclose you
when all I want is to believe you’ve already gone off
into a next space in a ghostwalk with the dead and your friends
awake to expectant veil light or is once more the daughter
simply there that she may dance no back row lily
of color and if that’s the picture there’s a warning
about seeking a truth in sex’s history striver’s truth claiming
some share of freedom by turning and housing our symptoms
while walking through the kitchen or paying for the moonfish fillets
