3 poems
FOR M -- TWO HANDS IN RED AND BLUE
for Meena Alexander
– ^ –
Hadi bakalim, come on, let's go.
Let’s pretend I know just how to build a home
that breaks these waves of false belonging.
And they are so warm and various -
the seats you pulled for me.
Just for a moment, let’s pretend, I know how to sit in those you taught
would never be of comfort.
--- The strange passage of a harbor
opens up. It fights all form and center ---
– ^ –
Enough, I said. You knew.
--- But then the sun became so bright against my thought
that language melted into something cosmic ---
So just for a moment, let’s pretend that I know all about the mirror --
and how resemblance is blood-streaked.
Let’s say I set my own eight eyes on the empty hand
that pulls us naked through the sky.
– ^ –
Come on. Let's go.
Let's find another room with better window access.
Let's talk about the ways you chose
to write about your blackness.
Because we're not so tired, are we darling?
We rise to write at 3am
with hopes of pleasant weather.
We are perhaps just one bright passage
of encounter -- some flickering
strength in flickering -- slicked oceans, new fragments --
This grief will never turn me into a better writer
I wrote, into my notebook -- ( Oh mushroom-headed city notebook
of water stone and wind, and I’m still not even sure how all
these haunted bugs of cold new light crept in )
-- but then I sent my words out farther.
FALSE HOLES I
after Daisy Atterbury’s writing and notes on my poem
– ^ –
I am looking for influence
and context. I have been repeatedly set upon this path,
although I reject it, although I must stubbornly reject
all the language that begins to touch my eyes.
Did I make it up, my eyes?
The self is a long symbol – self.
If self is true – if self is current.
– ^ –
I like blunt facts that accumulate in order to become sentiment.
Like lineage, like gender, like Frankenstein, or Drac.
I like where shame comes in as shame. I want the infection; I want
these formal voice shifts. I want the you question to be idiomatic; obtuse.
– ^ –
A strange sentiment erodes the narrative.
Erodes consciousness, erodes grip.
Like : language, language, language, lang.
It also erodes lang.
Our current quote of self is ‘thrash’
If self orders – look back ten.
– ^ –
My refusal to cite becomes : a cluster
and a child, posing as a father.
A false daughter becomes : fevers, intimacy,
and pornographic fame.
What are her locations?
– ^ –
Arrives : the you question.
Arrives : the question of you.
How will we treat these objects of study?
How will we find Dracula again?
– ^ –
She connects penetration with receiving. She connects receiving
with pain. She is noticing, she is academically admitting.
How else is this gesture occurring?
Else?
– ^ –
I write : you, voyeurism, void. A beingness
that won’t cohere. You, aparthood. You, the invariant.
You, a heart-shaped negation; a frame.
Close your values, close the sea.
If self is trailing –
please stop.
FALSE HOLES II
after Daisy Atterbury’s writing and notes on my poem
– ^ –
How romantic !
How people imagine academia, barbarism, dating other people’s libraries, the
quantum physics of jealousy, this strap-on as an idiom, the deeper knowledge
gained by finally – by truly – by sincerely
knowing nothing at all.
Here’s a good reminder : not everywhere is New York.
Here I am again soliciting a reader, although I stubbornly reject her. Here I am
refusing to reference, to be read alongside. Here I am existing (or not existing) in
the present. I am leaving the bar, I am constantly
in exit. An an an an. I am erasing the word an.
Whereas you – you build a world out of luxurious citation.
You evaporate through echo, vibe on distant meta-buzz.
You channel the wiser voice of explicit explication, you speak in holes
and then near-holes.
– ^ –
I spent twenty years learning that poems are not stories, are not
people, are not anything about.
Later on, the couples’ therapist turned to me and said :
Your feelings are all your own.
By controlling the terms, we imagine controlling
the scene that they are already carving.
– ^ –
The voice-over in this narrative is distracting. True or false.
Betweenness as opposed to nearness as opposed to subject
as opposed to what?
Negation and dissolution as opposed to admitting. False.
Sara Deniz Akant is a Turkish-American writer and educator. She is the author of Hyperphantasia (forthcoming from Rescue Press), Babette (Rescue Press 2015), and Parades (Omnidawn 2014). Her work has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and supported by the CUNY Graduate Center, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Willapa Bay, Yaddo, and Macdowell. She currently teaches writing at Baruch College, and co-curates the Kan Ya Makan readings series with Hala Alyan.