by Tommy Pico
Let’s say I’m coiled by the part in the Al Green song “Love & Happiness” after the toe-tap beginning when the guitar twang lifts a musk of mmmmgh into the air
Let’s say you’re talking to me when this happens and yr feelings bruise but I literally can’t
hear you
and in fact I no, no my finger to yr face when you
or that drop in “Mine” by Beyoncé where she says “no rest in the kingdom”
(note to self: write pop song called “Once, Twice, Three Times Beyoncé”)
the shreds of Al’s voice Bey’s deep gauze stuffed deep in my like chakras
I have the vague feeling in the thoroughfare of my thought process
like I care what yr saying ghostly
recognition of the fact that yr getting insulted, but srsly? Give me
a minute.
This absence of reason—but a flood that feels reasonable to me—is this I wonder is this, natural?
or does music turn me into a sociopath?
My roommate Danny says music makes you gay, but only some ppl realize this is happening.
Let’s say I want to get a nose piercing.
Let’s say I’m 30 years old.
Let’s say nothing big and bull-like, nothing too attractive, nothing chandeliering from septum to lobe. Just a simple, little stud nothing more.
Is it normal to get a nose ring at 30?
Normal is defined not by what it is, but what surrounds it. Meaning it could literally be anything, and is nothing.
Is it normal to get a nose ring at 30?
No, it’s not.
Am I just afraid of death?
Yes, probably.
Is there nothing more normal than fearing death?
It is very natural to fear death.
Should I get a nose ring?
It would look very cute on you.
My family’s experience isn’t fodder
for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs
But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?
Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game
Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil
Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company
and I am descended from a long line of wildfires
I mean tribal leaders
The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off
I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?
The sadness is systematic. Suspicion is the lesson that sticks. I forget
When Pio was young, he tended sheep. The flock numbered a couple thousand strong, and he herded them across the four corners of San Diego County
Drought makes us restless, searching for nourishing territory
Ventura kept horses. He used them to ferry NDN ppl across the county’s mountain trails, like the first reservation taxi driver. You cd say that, like his father, Ventura had a flock. They both went on to become chiefs
Sometime much later comes me
I scout from the peak
of our sacred mountain
I’m dragged to the center
of town in chains
I’m old women scattered
along the creek
my little hands squeeze
my little mouth shut
drawn into nooks
within the valley
like a sharp breath
while shaggy men on horseback
following the water
seek brown bodies
for target practice strong
brown backs for breaking
in the name of the church
Valle de las Viejas
blue echoes split
the early evening They spit
and ride on
but I keep my breath in
Cahuillas and Kumeyaays often banded together in the borderlands of Northern San Diego, esp post-contact. The name “Pablo” crosses both sides of our tribal lineages like a stitch. I’ve read they’re very good at peon, a game of predicting the banded patterns of black & white painted bones
Somehow other ppl know all the rules
of dating—Def do NOT send him that txt, Jess says
I wish more of my young self was free to learn abt flirting
and the Whitney Museum and the Shirelles
instead of which halls not to walk down for fear of getting my faggot ass beat or what to do when yr cousin high on crystal points a gun at you
but here we are at the cap of this party, sitting across a kitchen table getting hot drinking from the bottle. Yr the ghost of horror. I mean gust. I mean boner. I mean I’m new
at likin you. Generally.
You move. My move. Your move. My move.
I forget
the issue was citizenship. William Pablo became a figurehead of NDN resistance in the north: do our tribes remain independent—isolated on small reservations in the foothills and mountains—or descend to the city and assimilate into the general population?
The “You” consumes so sweetly
We forget the game ends.
People r so concerned abt “the Earth”
in the sense of kale salad and bruised
gin
She’ll be just fine. We might not make it, hopefully. We’ll exhaust ourselves soon what with global population blooms and San
Loco macho nachos and ruddy from frozen margaritas you reach for my arm. You drifted off again. You ask, What are you thinking about?
What the hell happened to INOJ
What are you all on, Radiolab is so fucking boring and white
noise That naked emperor
We’re chemists, but it’s not a science. Science is pretty racist, but inventions reflect their creators
keep living
keep living
keep living
there was an orchard in the valley. Sand Creek was shrinking. This is all very blurry to me. Candelaria gathered wild food from the hills and woods. She tamed the intrusion of Spanish crafts, made pinole—a blend of native seeds and Spanish barley. She churned butter and made lace. She ground acorn in ancient metates and wove baskets from dry grasses
We’re at San Loco bc that’s what I wrote
I was just thinkin The Last Supper says way more abt Da Vinci than it does abt the good book, you know? There’s no likeness for the apostles—those were just men about his life or something. Who is Jesus in the painting but the painter? Or is he the Judas?
Just kidding I never think.
James looks at me like I’m not speaking English. I believe in facts, he says. He says, you talk like you’re always being interrupted by yourself. He says, you always take big breaths before you speak, like an excited child.
Gulp.
What is a fact even?
James rolls his eyes. What do you mean what’s a fact? A fact is a fact. Facts are real. Proven. Objective.
like restaurants in a changing neighborhood
a straight guy saying “size queen”
white gay saying “GO OFF”
Kelly Clarkson singin w/ En Vogue that part in “Free Your Mind,” oh lord forgive me for havin straight hair, it doesn’t mean there’s another blood in my heir
Don’t get me wrong—I literally love Kelly Clarkson. Things reflect their intersections.
I say Facts are fallacies, created and curated by authority figures w/agendas and I say, Facts are used to subjugate, intimidate, enslave, and kill entire “races” of ppl reproductive rights etc I say, so yeah I have a complicated relationship with facts and pretty much everything. The only thing objective abt facts is yr blind allegiance to them. James.
or, I say nothing cos I’m tryin to get lucky.
I can�
��t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure—why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container
for words like whilst and hither and tamp. It conducts something of permanent and universal interest. Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core. They talk abt gravity, abt Adam, and Snow White and the stem of knowledge.
To me? Apple is a NDN drag queen who dresses like a milkmaid and sings “Half-Breed” by Cher
I wd give a wedgie to a sacred mountain and gladly piss on the grass of the park of poetic form
while no one’s lookin
I wd stroll into the china shop of grammar and shout LET’S TRASH THIS DUMP then gingerly slip out
and unrelated, once I called a cab to take me thru the drive-thru @ White Castle after the dining room closed
I sob
at a Tim Dlugos that Roy is reading me at the vegan diner on the formerly Italian side of Grand Street. This is OUR medium, he says.
My grandmother dreamed of Tin Pan Alley and wrote a song once with the chorus “Your kisses drop like atom bombs”
Get in, loser—we’re touring landscapes of the interior. In the mist
of words: the plume the matter the radiant energy
feeble defective inferior imbecility pure deviant
American mixed basic standard data crazy facts
moron intelligent classic good unfit fit sane
masc
open chill smooth fun educated artsy well-
traveled laid back cool quirky quality
toned agenda-free gifted nice professional athletic
secure facts down-to-earth mild-to-wild that
spark the x-factor my truth flesh tone support our troops she’s
crazy that’s amazing natural normal perfect
you know what I mean?
I have chosen—you have chosen—he or she had chosen—we have chosen—they have chosen
whose origin word, cēosan, meant something more like to taste or to try, “only remotely related to choice”
an illusion of capitalism, like control
Ppl often look unfazed by Kenyan university massacres and the onslaught of James Franco. Behavior is mutable. Mirrors love attention.
Like everyone,
I read a Choose Yr Own Adventure w/my fingers keepin tabs on various forks in the text, to backtrack when reachin a dead end
How often do you choose hunger, or cheese burger? A space in btwn is hard to see when you’re all borderlands—
We’re on the rooftop of the Wythe Hotel. It suggests exposure. It shoots up like teeth, the cool breeze sobering like a newly sober ex
turning softly into peaches from the light behind the bottles
He cups my neck (you hate all his friends) The hairs on his face like an English garden (his sister’s a racist) Taller than I remembered (he played you like a dolly then tossed you aside c’mon TEEBS)
carrying
the past in oneself, like a word
Language is engineered so naturally it’s like it doesn’t even happen
a shifty pigeon
eyes my sub sandwich
adaptive as progress, the grey city—it fevers me.
Language tells the story of its conquests, its champions, its admixtures, while moving onward into new vessels: Lupin the cat waddles to his water bowl.
Language often fails me, the static cling of an unknown word and the urge to be heard
but also
the full freakin phrases that are somehow a dry barrier to others like, black lives matter, or rape culture, or “spirit animal” suggests indigenous religion and spirituality is ridiculous
Linguists say a language is dead when its only speakers are adult, that in a hundred years 90% of the worlds languages will be kaput
A melody.
A lyric.
A cave.
A blue orbit suggested by echoes.
lol the word of the day on dictionary.com is diddle.
I will always be alone.
Here is a short, peaceful, pastoral lyric:
Crappy water
Shoots thru purgatory creek
On its way to the Colorado River
My bad, says the EPA after accidentally dumping 3 million gallons of waste in the stream.
Fuck you too, says Nature.
Onstage I’m a mess
of tremor and sweat
I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the faces
of attention and danger
The gift of panic is clarity—repeat the known quantities:
Today is Wednesday.
Wednesday is a turkey burger.
My throat is full of survivors.
Science says trauma cd be passed down, molecular scar tissue, DNA cavorting w/war and escape routes and yr dad’s bad dad
I’ve inherited this idea to disappear
Oh but you’re a natural performer
In the mid 1800s, California wd pay $5 for the head of an NDN and 25¢ per scalp—man, woman, or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds
When yr descended from a clever self adept at evading an occupying force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister
and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood
u flush under the hot lights
I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History
btwn two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case of “traditional” garb from one tribe or another it doesn’t really matter to anyone
and that word Natural in Natural History hangs
also History
also Peoples
hangs as in frames
it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed
as if in some reckless storm
but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts—history is so important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry—
Look, I’m sure you really do just want to wear those dream catcher earrings. They’re beautiful. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, I’m sure you don’t really think abt us at all. I’m sure you don’t understand the concept of off-limits. But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over the past four months wanted to live 50% more
I don’t want to be seen, generally, I’m a natural introvert, n I def don’t want to be seen by white ladies in buttery shawls,
but I will literally die if I don’t scream
An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like
I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston
I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry
In my poem, I cdn’t get out of bed for two days after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston
me n sweatpants n a new york slice
I feel dry as California
where I somehow managed to thrive in a climate of drought for thousands of years w/o draining the state, yet somehow we were primitive?
Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.
America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything. Some ppl will always have to be good sports remain calm
Remain Calm
Remain Calm
Who even wants to go into space? I fucking hate traveling
I’m a weirdo NDN faggot and frankly that limits my prospects
plus it sucks—watching the couples and the string lights
slow-dance in Monbijoupark, to realize
despite history
my own abrupt American body
America that green ghost, been af
ter me for at least a couple hundred years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a warm bath
Sun breaks upon the Pacific Northwest. Is this a nature poem again
