NICK STURM
I Feel YES
FROM I Feel YES, a chapbook
I climb into the machine and spend
two days thinking about lemonade.
I want to drink lemonade and watch the light
disappear into where I am speaking.
Language enters my life an infection in drag,
my hands feeling plural as if they’re hands
but also two or more kinds of vegetables
grown in a country where the sky touches
the distant mountains in a way that is
both beautiful and meaningless, the clouds
heavy static above the village where underwear
dries on a log while a small, ageless girl
stares at the words on a bottle of soda,
not understanding the language though
imagining she does, imagining a vast
world in which this object has meaning or
(which do you think is more important?) value,
imagining the sun cut from the sky and
kept in her pocket next to a smooth cold stone
from the river where her brothers swim
and nothing is digital, and even though
lemonade is unheard of, a state of affairs
that says little about my hands (what is
there to say?), it’s good enough and happening
and now here we are and I am glad. I feel
like a birthday is a good reason to be naked.
How about you? What do you think pleasure
smells like? What is your understanding of
the expression to make one’s hackles rise?
I’m going to say now I’m not in control.
My T-shirt could eat me—it just seems obvious
but either way I’m going to ask you to dance.
We’ll make smoothies out of rain and ride
motorcycles through fields of what has to be
commercially-grown lavender, how else
could there be so much of it? I’ll tell you
that many different things have the ability
to glimmer and that is as much a reason
for joy as for terror. Do you think of what
you eat as having come from a carcass?
Does part of you not believe yourself
when you call it making love? Does it sound
like I’ve been thinking about this for a long time?
I’ll never really know anything and that’s
why I’m on fire, helping my friend plug a tiny
amplifier into the part of me that still believes
I can wrap my disbelief in birds and bras
and that will be sufficient, or at least loud enough
to dance to without being aware of my body,
which is always in the way because the physical
world is determined by a range of parameters
but what does that matter here? Why not say
everything I feel? Everyday the sun paints me stupid
and I’ve never been more thankful for anything
than when my skin kisses up to oblivion
in the middle of a parking lot and my
strawberries spill out onto the pavement
like they’re alive. Just look at all this! Our heads
more expensive by the minute! I put on a blue coat
and walk into the kingdom. I stand in a puddle
for twenty-five years. I stand in a puddle
and for twenty-five years I am barely born.
Now, stained and weightless, I order Chinese food
in the dark. I watch a video of people
taking off their pants in public. I watch a video
of a video of a lion eating an antelope.
I don’t want to understand, I just want
to know you can hear me. My heart is pure
but I didn’t say that. I’m just a bastard
cloud confusing the light, a stupid hunk
of ones and zeros trying not to not
foul up the wires. I’m stranded on the edge
of the electorate cooking my hands
in their own juices. I want to be delirious
as a cheerleader full of candy! To express myself
in increasing wolf. I want to rent out
your respiratory system with my airwaves.
Call me a man and I’ll fill you with mixtapes
until you dance the feedback out of me.
My actions are excessive! Ice cream in Belarus!
October in a tree! Some precise blur
instructs me. That’s how I wrote this,
hovering above the desert in a motionless vessel.
I put a giraffe in a boat and laugh.
Thinking about it isn’t going to help.
Somewhere near me my inbox vibrates.
I don’t have any business. I feel emotional.
I’m wasting my time. How many ways can I say
something wrong. There’s piano skin
on my windowpane! Gravy sticking out of the night!
My multitasking awash in tapestries of light!
Revelation is ubiquitous, McNuggets in the grass.
I’m trying to live better, and many other things.
Every spring the meadow in its hysterical dress
and I all human and delusion. I vow through
the brouhaha with a temple in my fingerprint.
I vow through midnight with a swan
in my bourbon. I vow orgasms and antlers.
I vow to get up. And I do. But who am I
kidding? I’m not in charge. I mimic
the noise of insatiable flowers. I dress up
like a meadow and pretend I’m the world.
When I speak it is the opposite of bones.
Real life bones, my name on my hands.
I understand now, the valley full of brains.
Let’s have a conversation using only our skin.
Here I’ll start where I’m lonely and wet.
I will never be as good as the snow
breeding in the clouds and the world
eating the snow as it falls around the birds,
the real life birds that are ridiculous tools,
the real life birds that should be arrested
but are not, and the birds in the machine
as it hums and humans and the humming
now a kind of snow that builds and hums,
humming into the world that is a real life bird,
a bird a machine inside a real life word,
a word a totem of inarticulate grammars and grammar
a bird that should be arrested but is not. I just want
to be simple and hanging out a window with my hands
in the sky. To never die, that is the nature of
the machine, the machine that is only fog
between my fingers, the idea of a lake
emerging from the idea of rain, the idea that
I can say something and you will hear it.
That is how I know I am here. Here with birds
and stupidity and pieces of weather. Here where
I drive around all day in the blue light revolving.
Here where I speak in the shape of other humans
speaking. Here where I compare life to an avocado
and the university trembles! I drink lemonade
next to a whale. I drink lemonade and migrate
into a system of becoming. I drink lemonade
and establish relationships based on love
for things that are invisible, or in other words,
faith, which, along with stupidity,
is what brought me here thinking
about lemonade in the first place and
if I had to conceptualize what I mean
by “first place,” which is an expression
that denotes a temporal sequence
in terms of an abstracted spati
al structure,
the beautiful thing about what I would say
is that I never knew that just thinking
about lemonade would get me here
like how when I pull a bag of oranges
out of a dumpster and make juice from them
and I’m drinking it I think about the person
who works for the grocery store who decided
to throw away that bag of oranges or who
was ordered to throw away that bag of oranges
because of the rotten orange at the bottom
and how when that grocery store employee
absent-mindedly, or perhaps not, perhaps
with a high degree of awareness, tossed
that bag of oranges into the dumpster that
person would never have imagined another person
ever touching those oranges again, let alone
eating them, and then I think back
to the truck that delivered the oranges
and the person who drove that truck and
how they might have touched these oranges
not thinking of them as oranges but as
only some materialized idea of the continual
struggle to understand how to live while
also working and doing something meaningful or
(which do you think is more important?) valuable,
and then I think back to the building
where the oranges were sorted and stickered
and bagged and back to the first truck
that took the oranges from the orange grove
and the people who picked the oranges
with their lives and the things they love and hate
and their thoughts when they read the news
and their lips and bedrooms and hands,
their hands always smelling of oranges,
which may or may not be meaningful or
(which do you think is more important?) valuable,
and their orgasms, shared or not, and how this
incongruous system of human and nonhuman motion
could lead to this bag of oranges in a dumpster
without any mouth to take in their architecture,
without these oranges satisfying some need, some
basic, universal, almost tangible need to know
that our existence is purposeful, which is often
the way one feels sitting on a park bench holding
a single orange barely caring what happens,
and how the breakdown of such a system is
something we all have to account for in our own ways
and how writing this poem feels like that,
confusion coupled with action mixed with some
vague hope that we’ll somehow get somewhere,
which is why I climbed into the machine at all.
Then as long as we’re here together let’s agree
there be no knowing in the making, a knot,
that it show how in the motion, the machinery.
Let’s agree that the only thing shared by nations
and snow is that no matter what they touch
they always disappear. Let’s agree that if I took
a picture of your face right now and later showed it
to a stranger they would say Who is this beautiful person
I do not know? and I would say I do not know
because I do not pretend to know you, I only pretend
to speak. And let’s agree that in the light
making its way quietly through the valley
there are noises no one knows exist that communicate
nothing and are never repeated and in that light
there is one perpetual question every person
and poem exists to answer, essentially
what’s so hard about being happy being
in awe of everything? I need to believe
I would suffer to save you. Amidst cell phones
and bar glass kissing and smashing my face sentimental
for better or for worse or for even better, galloping
full of wine into the parade, removing the plexiglas
between our bodies and our bodies, and our bodies
discovering what they mean when they say
“I am in love with an emergency of symbols!”
What part of a moose don’t you understand?
What would it take for you to take off your pants
in public? What if I took off my pants right now
and laid down in the grass, if we could find any,
and in an unsexual way asked you to join me?
Is that even possible? What part of the question
do you think I’m referring to and what do you think
I mean by “possible”? I generate hogwash
in my torso! The proper use of a hammer
is to wear a petticoat and be inconsistent!
A feverish joy scatters into the citizenry!
Isn’t this what’s supposed to happen
going from meaning to meat to mouth?
The president stands naked in the middle
of the forest! I make sandwiches
for everyone who hates me! After that
what happens is made of fucking flowers.
I look out my window at the light
licking snow off the dumb bodies of air
conditioning units and finally get a grasp
on why everything I love is so leaving.
Why something in a word out of its body
makes me feel everywhere as air, air that lives
in mouths and birds all peach pie and dynamite.
All genetic ballistics in the begonias. I am
the first person ever to touch this tree and for this
the thing that is the word that is my soul
is happy. I mumble into the incredible.
I kiss the idea of peace and give in to feeling
vulnerable despite what’s foreign about my teeth.
Believe me I swear what I mean when I’m lying.
I want to cuddle until our bodies go
gossamer. I want to know how much gasoline
it would take to get me and all my friends
to California. I want to know what would happen
if instead of gasoline it was lemonade and instead
of California it was the kind of sky that happens
over California and instead of the sky over
California it was just me and you and a bag of oranges
astonishing our faces. It has something to do with
how I want to build a symphony for breakfast. How
I’m angry at clouds. How sometimes I imagine
my credit card laying in the muck at the bottom
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 38
