by Farid Matuk
California onto us impelled toward us impediment and back on the edge
surface of our contact turns out
a type of porcelain for casual curates and a type of porcelain for court
“Form—it’s because there are consequences.”—Lisa Robertson
and if words alone are tracers in the negative
I’ll keep writing you to move it welcomed
by the outline where you could drop the word
you know you say that’s not even the most brittle shape above us
leaves are turning their gray sunless sides every which way
so to wipe gone the track of your next minute your little voice says
the reservoir goes on forever and it does in a funny wave
shining cityscapes of gravel poised at our heads looped a kind
delay of form of any owned will chafed down to red silt and feeling
laid out on this dusty plain opening under a mirroring sky
its available dead look down to each grain of sand those sharpest edges
their binding single selves in facets in such futures to be simple and done
sparklers branch into three or four twigs at their ends every time
and in a turning over of paper or in lacquered thinnest layers of my habits
you say you hear gold leaf a glaze drying on the hand and honey in the mix
each the other’s animals we keep talking to move the words is a sounding
so if the dead and the shipped get to us we could be not a people but a floor
didn’t you go there already so hard of conditions
that don’t come any which way in time
for you having been gone
so given to so articulated
in the disarrayed c’mon of you
observing the sounds of the world
unboxed unchaste
if it’s the wrong verb to stay
somewhere in the forward
line of your reactions do you trust
a sensuality less fanciful
ungenetic plaited
at the service of our obstruction
doesn’t it run back too sending you
this far into this wanting to be about freedom
somebody means the mistakes
hearing two or three birds
in the call of one arching
to visit everywhere onto its name
vaults us to an attitude held in their soft eyes soft lids
like an end in an image of arches seeming to open as he passed
Henry emerged singing a hymn of thanksgiving
every night out of “him of thanksgiving” having gone
again in the typo in the thing in which to hide
is how we’ll keep leaving it in the real street
I want to say is the word and its voice run ahead
to where we can do what we want not bound even to that
the nation wanes I’m not afraid you’ll turn back
Notes
The Arabic graffiti appearing across the copyright page can be translated as “Homeland is racist.” It is adapted with permission from the digital image “Homeland is racist,” 2015, a documentation of a broadcast media hack performed by the Arabian Street Artists (Heba Amin and collaborators). The production company for the TV program Homeland sought “Arabian street artists” who might lend a sense of authenticity to its set of a Syrian refugee camp. The artists’ intervention aired on October 11, 2015, Homeland Season 5, Episode 2.
“Anguish exists. / Man uses his old disasters like a mirror” are the first lines of Roque Dalton’s “Ars Poetica” (trans. Hardie St. Martin). I take this book’s epigraph from the poem’s last line.
A Daughter Having Been of the Type
The term “pledge of resistance” refers to an organizing model popularized by groups seeking to prevent all-out U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s.
Sojourner Truth staged her portrait in the manner of white bourgeois femininity and had it printed as a carte de visite, a photographic calling card, captioned with the statement “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” a nod to, among other things, her practice of capitalizing on the sale of these prints to fund her speaking tours.
I borrow and tweak the line “Ellington was only after your confidence” from Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Moten is quoting Herb Jeffries, a Duke Ellington vocalist, who suggests the listener’s ear is an element of a composition waiting to be arranged.
In the Gospel according to John, “glory” gives an arrangement that is self-evident, as when Jesus pulls Lazarus out of his grave. The synoptic Gospels offer instead a Jesus who minds the dynamic between his miracles and what Jews in disparate communities say of his provenance and purpose, often asking some variation of the question, “Who do the people say I am?”
Lists such as “Sacramento then unspecified . . .” refer to sites of executions and lynchings compiled by Ken Gonzales-Day for his book Lynching in the West: 1850–1935. His totals by perceived race, nationality, or ethnicity: 8 African Americans, 41 American Indians, 29 Chinese (excluding those shot in the 1871 massacre), 120 Anglo-Americans or persons of European descent, 132 Latin American or Mexican, 22 unknown.
If antiblackness occupies a foundational space in creating the orders that hold out a promise of their breaking, I don’t think these tallies trouble that space. I do think they testify to the opportunistic and circumstantial articulations of whiteness as a claim to life.
Rendering his memory of Juan Flores, white vigilante Horace Bell writes: “His eyes, neither black, gray, nor blue, greatly resembling those of the owl—always moving, watchful and wary, and the most cruel and vindictive-looking eyes that were ever set in the human head.”
Sepulveda, a major thoroughfare in modern-day Los Angeles, was also the name of the ranch owned by Don Sepulveda where the Barton posse rested on their way to Flores and his men.
Ken Gonzales-Day extracts the definition of the “shout pouch” from period accounts. Reacting to Sheriff Barton’s murder, vigilantes lengthened their shout pouches with each kill of a brown man.
A Daughter the Real Horse
I am indebted to Daphne Brooks for her book Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910, from which I take the quoted text in this poem. Some of these statements Adah Menken made in letters and in interviews, others come from reviews of her performances written by white male critics.
Making and breaking relations, contexts, and contiguities, Plato’s Glaucon waves a mirror about the streets of an imagined city.
“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest . . .”—Huck Finn.
Installed on immense spools, panoramas scrolled past the audience offering continuous scenery as if viewed from a galloping horse, a passing boat, or a moving train.
The panorama poem “like reaching running toward . . .” uses and alters phrases from Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent and Elin Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater.
“Mr. Hands” was the name Kenneth Pinyan used for himself in the zoophilic community.
“Shake that bear” references a viral video depicting the killing of an adolescent bear, after which the woman who pulls the trigger and her hunting guide enjoy intercourse over the bear’s corpse.
“Far be it from me to criticize, but . . .” yields the derogatory labels “farbee” and “farb,” applied to U.S. Civil War reenactors who fail to mind the details of their gear, thus jeopardizing their fellows’ access to “period ecstasy.”
Parian porcelain was developed around 1845 as an inexpensive imitation of marble.
A Daughter That She May Touch the Deployments
In her narrative Sojourner Truth alludes to sexual assault she experienc
ed at a young age at the hands of either Sally or Elizabeth Dumont.
See the poem “Do any black children grow up casual?” by Harmony Holiday.
Retablos in Mexican folk art depict divine interventions into human acts and are often captioned with brief narratives and moral lessons.
“Nobody / no time” is an excerpt from “Nobody,” Bert Williams’s signature song.
See the poem “The Eye-Beaters” by James Dickey.
I take the lines “A New Rule in Algebra . . .” from a political cartoon published in U.S. newspapers during the Mexican–American War.
See the poem “Beyond My Door, Behind My Back Porch” by Susan Briante.
See a posting by the writer Anne Boyer on, I believe, Instagram.
See the poem “1992” by Alice Notley.
No Address
As a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement, Rachel Corrie practiced the strategy of creating human shields in which activists place themselves among vulnerable populations hoping fear of “first world” state retribution will keep conflicts from escalating into violence. This logic offers bodies with Anglo phenotypes as signs of privileged national status. Other such groups include Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International.
I take the epigraph “Reportless Subjects . . .” from the poem numbered 1048 in the Thomas H. Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
“[L]et’s make like a girl mean something amazing commercial” refers to ads sponsored by the Procter & Gamble conglomerate’s Always brand that aim to increase self-confidence in girls entering puberty. P&G’s sourcing, research and development, and labor practices have been linked to deforestation, animal abuse, illegal expansion of genetically modified organisms into “third world” markets, and abusive working conditions in migrant-staffed citrus farms in Florida.
“[T]he voice said to Duriel . . .” refers to an incident the poet, composer, and performer Duriel E. Harris shared in a conference talk.
I take the line “a bigger more respectable more competent” from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
The Los Angeles Times reports Predator drone operators flying missions in Afghanistan said, “We see shadows . . .”
“Sleep terrors are episodes of screaming, intense fear and flailing while still asleep.”—Mayo Clinic.
Guanshiyin is a female deity to some and a spiritually enlightened human to others. Her name may be translated as “observing the sounds of the world” or “the one who hears the cries of the world.” Ceramic figurines depicting Guanshiyin are sometimes cast with a detachable left hand, which petitioners withhold until their prayers are answered. My mother kept one such figurine across our migration.
Part of the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement, spirit dancers summoned multiple male and female spirits of various ethnicities and races in rapid succession while their bodies were committed to the demands of dance.
“Embracing, the dumb will speak, the lame will walk!” is from César Vallejo’s poem “Hymn to the Volunteers of the Republic” (trans. James Higgins).
Long Range Acoustic Devices transmit sound at up to 149 decibels, causing immediate headaches, vertigo, and, in some cases, irreversible hearing loss. The Active Denial System developed by Raytheon projects “a focused millimeter wave energy beam” that produces intolerable heating sensations on skin.
I’m grateful again to Fred Moten, who in helping me think about being a daughter’s father used the phrase “the sheer c’mon of her.”
In The Fire Next Time James Baldwin argues for a sensuality that is “much simpler and much less fanciful” than the simultaneously excessive and diminished sensuality coded by the white racial imaginary into nonwhite bodies.
In Henry “Box” Brown’s Mirror of Slavery, Brown emerged from the box singing a hymn of thanksgiving, his translation of Psalm 40’s lamentation into a song of near-ecstatic pleasure. “[H]im of thanksgiving” is a typo in the song’s title as reproduced in the British edition of Brown’s Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself.
After Brown’s production closed, he resurfaced in 1864 walking the streets of Wales dressed as an African king and accompanied by a footman. He appears in the historical record again in 1875 in New England as a magician, blindfolded seer, and spiritualist entertainer by the name of Professor H. Box Brown.
See also reservoir, friend, figure, mirror, obstruction, horse:
Heba Y. Amin, hebaamin.com
Plato’s Phaedrus
Ange Mlinko’s “How Poems Think: The Power of Lyric Poetry Lies in Negation, Not Self-Assertion” in The Nation
Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life
Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh’s Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
Unidentified photographer, La Chola Martina, Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections, University of Southern California, reprinted in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West as plate 12
Barbara McCandless’s “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity: Promoting the Art” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, edited by Martha A. Sandweiss
Mary Niall Mitchell’s “‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ or So It Seemed” in American Quarterly
Terry Carter’s documentary film A Duke Named Ellington
Sheila E.’s Romance 1600
Ilona Katzew’s Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger
Gustavo Arellano’s OC Weekly articles “The Assassination of Sheriff James Barton by the Mexican Juan Flores” and “Top 5 Latinas in Orange County History!”
Prince’s Sign o’ the Times
Philip Zarrilly’s The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance, and Structure
Robert Allen’s Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture
International Panorama Council, panoramacouncil.org
John Wieners’s A Superficial Estimation
Charles Mudede and Robinson Devor’s Zoo, a documentary film exploring the life and death of Kenneth Pinyan
Jennifer Christine Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography
Allison Smith, allisonsmithstudio.com
The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Roberta Panzanelli, Eike Schmidt, and Kenneth Lapatin
Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828
Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
Harmony Holiday’s Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues and Hollywood Forever
The James Dickey Reader, edited by Henry Hart
Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion
Lindon W. Barrett’s Blackness and Value: Seeing Double
Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue
Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women
Alice Notley’s Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2005
Predator drone operator transcripts at latimes.com
Cristina Demaria’s “The Performative Body of Marina Abramović” in European Journal of Women’s Studies
Matthew Akers’s documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Reverend Hiram Mattison’s Spirit-Rapping Unveiled!
Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture
Tu Fu’s Travels of a Chinese Poet (trans. Florence Ayscough)
Susan Howe’s 1979 interview with Bernadette Mayer for Pacifica Radio
Human Rights Watch, hrw.org
Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice, rachelcorriefoundation.org
Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria
Lisa Robertson’s Nilling
Fred Moten’s lecture “Blackness and Nonperformance,” available on YouTube
Jeffrey Ruggles’s The Unboxing of Henry Brown
Tyehimba Jess’s Olio
Hollis Robbins’s “Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics” in American Studies
Joanna Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures
Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of some of these poems appeared in the chapbook My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta Press, 2013); in the anthologies Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press, 2014), Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, volume 3 (Lake Forest College Press, 2014), Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak on Palestine (OR Books, 2015), and Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil / Dispatches Editions, 2017); in the journals Black Warrior Review, The Baffler, Bright Pink Mosquito, Cream City Review, Critical Quarterly (UK), Denver Quarterly, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, The Iowa Review, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva Escritura de las Américas, Mizna, Sonora Review, Poetry, Poem: International English Language Quarterly (UK), Sous les Pavés, Third Coast, White Wall Review (Canada); and online at the Dusie Kollectiv’s Tuesday Poem, ESQUE, ONandOnScreen, /One/ The Journal of Literature, Art, and Ideas, past simple, the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, Poets.org, and Tupelo Quarterly. Thank you to the curators, editors, and publishers of these spaces.
This work was made possible in part with the support of Headlands Center for the Arts, which afforded me the space and time to begin these poems and then invested a New Works Grant and a second studio residency in their completion. I am deeply grateful to the center’s staff and board and to the artists and writers who shared this special place with me.
