by Tommy Pico
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The stars are dying
like always, and far away, like what you see looking up is a death knell from light, right? Light
years. But also close, like the sea stars on the Pacific coast. Their little arms lesion and knot and pull away
the insides spill into the ocean. Massive deaths. When I try to sleep I think about orange cliffs, bare of orange stars. Knotted, glut. Waves are clear. Anemones n shit. Sand crabs n shit. Fleas. There are seagulls overhead. Ugh I swore to myself I would never write a nature poem.
The sand is fine. They say it’s not Fukushima. I feel fine, in the sense that I feel very thin—I been doin Tracy Anderson DVD workouts on YouTube, keeping my arms fit and strong. She says reach, like you are being pulled apart
I can’t not spill. Sometimes it, sometimes . . . what you see is what you glut. There are sometimes insides.
I can’t write a nature poem
bc it’s fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.
Let’s say I’m at a pizza parlor
Let’s say I’m having a slice at the bar this man walks in to pick up his to-go order
Let’s say his order isn’t ready yet and he’s chatty
Let’s say I’m in Portland bc ppl don’t tawlk to me in NYC
Let’s say he’s like, meatballs are for the baby, pizza’s for the little man, Caesar salad’s for the wife and the beer he points to the beer and then thumbs at himself, the beer’s for me.
He has one of those cracked skin summer smiles
He keeps talking like I want to hear him
Like he’s so comfortable
Like everybody owes him attention
I’m a weirdo NDN faggot
He puts his hands on the ribs of my chair asks do I want to go into the bathroom with him
Let’s say it doesn’t turn me on at all
Let’s say I literally hate all men bc literally men are animals—
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
I don’t like boys, men, or guys.
Don’t like how they kick it on couches,
laid back, calves cocked
the neck muscles thrust up.
Don’t like their dumb biceps bouncing the thunderclap laugh choosing trucks over pink!? The musk the swoony wake, the misc bulges, stupid weight training Spot me bro—
I was like pfffft, I says yr kind of hard to miss?
What they say to anyone ever in history, or in the locker room when they think no one is listening in a tight towel. Or everyday when they expect attention, ppl wide-eyed ears like satellites the words (apparently) torch torchin to truth.
Don’t like them tweeting, texting, um peeling rubber wetsuits off in the parking lot
sweatpants no discernible underwear lookin like whatever
Or! When they slick back swab the deck pocket square shoulders—
The wave, the fade, the bang bangs.
Men dancing is fine tho.
Or like maybe men in socks? I dunno
I can’t write a nature poem
bc I only fuck with the city
and my dentist is the only man who’ll stick his meaty fingers
in my mouth rn. The office of my hummingbird heart rattles the sparkling office.
It’s okay, he says. It’s kind of . . . You’ll hear when I clap my hands, but you won’t really care.
Sooooo it’s like gas-induced sociopathy?
Crickets.
He twists the knob
feeling bobs the biochemical
delta—care rolls out to sea. Cut off the head?
and a body can jerk for minutes afterward. Is life more than a byproduct of nerves
crunch crunch heave have you ever eaten
rattlesnake? Not to be cliché, but it tastes like chicken. Everything tastes like chicken, but then again I have shockingly little taste.
It’s hard
feeling like a carcass bc u literally can’t feel
like a carcass. You feel around instead.
I come around slowly, oxygen fuzzy dead bone spittle—a hole in my head.
Winter is a death threat from nature, and I don’t respond well to predation—
it’s not like summer, death in the form of barking men
takin issue w/the short shorts and the preen and the queenly holding hands
god forbid u step into the gnashing cold for a fizzy water and grapes, forget yr keys, the cell battery
dies n yr roommates out of town with their holiday families
plus mittens are dumb af
AND it’s easy to fantasize abt snow when yr raised on the cusp of a desert—
Kumeyaay ppl aren’t built for winter like metaphor—I mean metabolically
and it happens, get this, it happens every. damn. year.
There’s no exposure in Southern California,
no clanging heat in San Diego.
in LA? The snow comes in a can.
Cold was a curiosity, like rain. A ghost. No. A reanimation, a flourish of calendar art and novels with families in living rooms, huddled in a blizzard’s fist.
We used the fireplace
for its smoky tang. When rains came from the eyelids of the sky, I cd feel the land licking the roof of its mouth. Hella satisfied.
Men smack
the monoliths in Mosul back to stone and dust. I’m devastated
in the midst of Vicodin
Thank god for colonialist plundering, right? At least some of these artifacts remain intact behind glass, says History
Kumeyaay burial urns dug from context, their ashes dumped and placed on display at the Museum of Man. Casket art, mantelpieces in SoCal social well-to-do living rooms
A warden is seldom welcomed, I say.
Lives flicker, says History
I, too, wd like a monument, says Ego.
I’m abt to get fucked by Don Draper on a rooftop but stinging smoke wraps us like thick blankets I wake up like fuck did I have a cigarette last night, no dry sockets plz
but it’s just my neighborhood on fire—I
rush outside the billow yanks across the sky and into Queens. It’s an archive burning, a record storage building near the water. Singed bits of text rain onto the concrete, streets swallowed in fragments like a Sappho
How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees
is not something I wd include in a nature poem.
Captive and being returned to the wild
captive breeding and release program
Marius the giraffe put down by his handlers at Copenhagen Zoo, dissected in front of patrons and fed to the lions
literally fed to the lions
in 2014
child slaves sleeping on fishing nets in Somalia, in Bangkok
OkCupid asks what’s worse—a starving child or a starving dog, and I’m like is this a fucking joke?
Dragonflies experience a kind of quantum time, see a much richer spectrum of colors like a range of snowcapped mountains on molly and mushrooms and sherbet watercolors
and I’m supposed to believe we’re such miracles?
Ray Rice punches his girlfriend unconscious on camera and drags her out of the elevator, and I’m supposed to give a fuck about pesticides?
That’s not a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
Janjaweed, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Oscar Pistorius, the Tea Party, Andrew Jackson, the Niña the Pinta and the Santa Maria
WHAT’S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line.
In order to ta
lk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by a gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milky Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang.
How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?
UM, AMERICAN? I say
or
KUMEYAAY. I say I’M FROM THE KUMEYAAY NATION,
which are both technically true, but I know that when he says NATIONALITY he’s saying you look vaguely not like a total white boy plus I’m trying to get lucky, so I put on my face that’s the opposite of a tall can tipped over and glugging out onto the floor
I’M FROM AN INDIAN RESERVATION NEAR SAN DIEGO I burst back, over the drag queen sort of singing the Michael Bublé version of “Feelin Good.”
When James hugs me hello
he stoops
(bc he is very tall)
nuzzles his forehead into the hook
of my neck
takes a big, long sniff
growls soft and low.
James is a stone
cold
dummy. But when he does that?
If this was an 80s hair band music video
I wd totally groupie
toss my frillies onto the stage of James.
Dear Gays,
I wish yr attention span was as “athletic”
as yr bod
The world is infected
Systemic pesticides get absorbed by every cell of the plant, accumulate in the soil, waterways
kiss the bees
knees, knees (in a Guns N’ Roses way)
goodbye.
The world is a bumble bee
in the sense that, who cares?
My thumb isn’t terribly green but it’s terribly thumbing at me
it seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny
In the deepest oceans
the only light is fishes—
luciferin and luciferase mix ribbons flutter in the darkness
i am so dumb thinking about this makes me cry i am so dumb
Dear NYC:
The only thing viral about Ebola is the Internet.
oh, but you don’t look very Indian is a thing ppl feel comfortable saying to me on dates.
What rhymes with, fuck off and die?
It’s hard to look “like” something most people remember as a ghost,
but I understand the allure of wanting to know—
Knowledge, or its approximate artifice, is a kind of equilibrium when you feel like a flea in whiskey.
I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of Garbage
by A. R. Ammons
the old mysteries avail themselves of technique.
It’s disheartening
to hear someone say “there’s no magic left” bc I love that YouTube of Amy Winehouse singing “Love Is a Losing Game” at the Mercury Prize Ceremony and yesterday I overheard that Brooklyn means “Broken Land”—there aren’t many earthquakes in the city, but there’s the fault line of my head.
Pain is alienating, but blue breath breaking on a voice is the magic that makes ppl believe.
What, I learn to ask, does an NDN person look like exactly?
This white guy asks do I feel more connected to nature
bc I’m NDN
asks did I live like in a regular house
growing up on the rez
or something more salt
of the earth, something reedy
says it’s hot do I have any rain
ceremonies
When I express frustration, he says what? He says I’m just asking as if being earnest somehow absolves him from being fucked up.
It does not.
He says I can’t win with you
because he already did
because he always will
because he could write a nature
poem, or anything he wants, he doesn’t understand
why I can’t write a fucking nature
poem.
Later when he is fucking
me I bite him on the cheek draw
blood I reify savage lust
I’m telling YOU all about ME
In order to prove OUR intelligence, OUR right to live, WE becomes I
a distinct note above the cacophony of the land and the animals and the scar tissue running across the gauntlet of the sky
I have to pee so fucking bad
I tell my singing teacher.
I tell Roy that since I been taking singing lessons, it’s harder to hold it in. The fill of breath and the body’s fist jabbing forward—
So, if I wait? I’m going to piss my pants.
I am the opposite of pee shy.
Do you remember Fergie? Do you remember when Fergie peed on stage? In San Diego?
Okay, jeez go to the bathroom, she says.
Even minor snaps I cast a srs argument.
My singing teacher tells me find your center
Tornado fucking is a natural phenomenon
wherein you start on your stomach,
get flipped to the right side,
then he slides under you slams
u into his hips, both in a sort of crab walk flip left
before returning to (yoga term) stomach pose.
When me n James fuck around the house, we fuck around
the house.
That’s some Shame shit
says my roommate after I dusk back from Adam’s
after waking up with James
spending the afternoon at Ryan’s place.
No Jess, I’m a faggot on a Saturday
Gay men are the worst people ever
bc if they don’t want to fuck you,
you are nothing to them.
Yet they love dogs.
“Malibu” by Hole is one of the greatest songs in America
when I was younger I thought it was a sexy like summer story abt the sandy aesthetic wonder of a SoCal summer beach town
How you listen to something completely in yr own head.
and it does sort of function in that pop anthem sense, but maybe now as an adult w/an inured understanding of shorthand, addiction’s weather-beaten features, and who quite frankly has felt the reluctant love you sometimes can’t even look at
now I understand it’s a plea
to get someone famous into rehab—
Malibu, a destination for the famously fucked up
We’re all watching you. You know what to do.
It’s biblical, submit to the angels and Part the sea
to yr freedom
but the object is swallowed
Songs r spells
like poems
imagine casting one to drive the lover dry
Creating a sublime hook
a thrall of fandom in its wake
Yet the mate remains eternally unsaved
Last night I had a dream that I was a ghost who gave blowjobs and that is pretty much the experience of dating in the city
When I say I’m having catfish banh mi
what I mean is leave me alone
what I mean is I love candy but I’m an adult I only let myself have candy at the movies
so I’ve been goin to the movies A LOT
Sometimes on dates I buy the box of gold bears but keep them scrunched in the cup holder on the arm rest bc I don’t want him to think I’m the kind of adult who still hoovers candy (by which I mean I don’t want to b the kidn of adult who still hoovers candy) but fuck I still bought them like in good fun was gonna offer h
im some but he doesn’t like sweets and I thot too long abt the prospect of box of gummies breach n we been kind of cuddlin so the flick is halfway over all those other snacky losers finished their soppy nachos or r just wrapped in the movie like a normal person n it’s waaaaay past the crinkling hour but HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH he has to pee so I quick rip the shit like a bird neck eat a handful of gummy bears shove
