sorry, i'm not here right now

leave a poem after the beep.

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Alina, This arrives perhaps out of order on the website, depending on who laps whom in these last few days of our project. It arrives definitively out of order in that it's an excerpt from a longer thought, one which I can only hold in my head as a collection of pleasant phonetics. No clear speaker, no clear POV, no clear expression of no clear feelings—what is this poem? I'm sick and I don't get it. I've read through the whole book thrice in the year since I got it and each time I was sick, each time I reached for it instead of the doctor. It's made of a cool material that I don't understand. It dissolves a little bit at a time into the water. Love, Thomson (Pathetic Tower is available from Make Now, 2014)

text:

from Pathetic Tower, section 2. or must change of knife, find a new thicket to hack through as a wall of jackets blocks the elevated library and men spread out to fiddle with the mechanism labour jacked but not falling out, what the riot when it comes off is— efforts just revolting note in smooth subtle breakfast colours, incomplete but suggestive outlines of equivalence/minimal ideas like cell bombs one is for every high theory of economy childhood meats early account of a tablet, political blow two boyfriends swap categories (mince) brief future pledge stops and footholds, incise or incisors fillets and snappings/teeth-bound or mesh right there in hazel pants, body surrounded by dogs projected by a temporal sequence lit in different colours write like a menu

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Thomson, I read this poem years ago & today woke up w/ a fragment of it looping in​side​ my head like​ a song's refrain. This one goes on th​e mixtape about my April, for sure.​ xo, Alina ​"April Sad and Wild"​ appears in Sign You Were Mistaken (Factory Hollow Press,  2013)

text: APRIL SAD AND WILD Now I find in myself some days half the time the enkindled hue in agitation so much for the instincts of this body no better than bark and turtle-like falling into the hands falling now I find some half the time some half of me this April sad and wild in the middle always so much now something slight cul-de-sac on fire a little bit more the work of this slight small pressure history the hole at the pole end of the earth galvanized entirely exciting what are you thinking about I’m thinking about you occasionally do you want to get food a loophole do you want to go somewhere.

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Alina, A surly teenage-feeling year-zero declaration in stutters from Chelsey Minnis today. School is basically out for summer/forever. These poems make me feel like I could write poems, too, and also like maybe I understand them. Love, Thomson (Prefaces 7-9 can be found in Bad Bad, Fence Books, 2007) PREFACE 7 I want to write a poem because I don't feel very boring! But I will feel like a stuffed leopard because of the praise. No one should get paid to write poems and nobody should even be allowed to write them. But a love poem will not fail. Do you think I am very happy, with my uncut wrists? PREFACE 8 I have a quality that is like a libertine... Which is that I have a great desire to enjoy my own disgust.... If I am a poet I am the worst kind of poet... Someone once thought that a poem should be more than an elaborate "fuck you," but I did not think it. PREFACE 9 If poetry is dead...then good. I know what will be fun! I'll buy your book and ask you to sign it and then throw it in the trash. Of all the beautiful rip-offs this will be my favorite... Poetry has to update or I will begin to rip my sleeves down... Anyway, poor everyone who never went to Harvard...

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Thomson,

​This poem reminds me so much of my own internal monologue. Levity even when things are out of sorts. I'm still walking around like the world's a giant seashell & I'm pressed to it, waiting. Listening. Maintaining rituals in the interim. I pulled a Ten of Pentacles this morning​ & left it face up on my desk.

Love, Alina​

"They Are Leaving You a Message" appears in Heliopause (Wesleyan, 2015) ​​ They Are Leaving You a Message ​​for Arda Collins What they are trying to tell you is you are wearing the wrong bra for your shape and situation This might not even be your life and in the midst of my thinking to tell you this a fruit fly has begun to trail me through the house as if I were its mother or as if it were the other way around and it always is and the house is on fire at some point in the simultaneity and I am leaving it to buy all the things I do and do not devour

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Alina, I found this just today. This project has sent me scampering in pursuit of new poetry—I haven't been reading much of anything that hasn't been assigned to me, at this point in the term. Today I scooped a copy of Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizanik (trans. Yvette Siegert) off the shelf at the bookstore because it was the right size (small, neat, short, fast) to fit into the present configuration of my life. It's beautiful. I can't wait to show it to you in person in a month, right after I say hello to your new tattoo. All yours, Thomson "14." appears in Diana's Tree, available from Ugly Duckling Presse (original 1962, translation 2014) text: 14. The poem I don't say, the one I don't deserve. The fear of being two the way a mirror is: someone asleep in me eats and drinks from me.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, THOMSON GUSTER.

text:

A Fly Inside a Fly a Thought Inside a Thought and Mario Santiago Inside Mario Santiago

tr. Laura Healy

What do you feel, tell me what do you feel when the birds get lost in red and you’re steadied against a wall, your pants split and hair disheveled as if you’d just killed a president. What do you feel in the reddening hour, in the agitprop hour, boots sinking into the snow of an avenue where no one knows you. Forked tongue of knowing how to be alone and images that destiny (so pleasant) drags beyond the hills. Tell me, what do you feel. What color do your remarkable eyes turn then.

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goes with yesterday’s SINHRN!  Lara Plenum’s “Excrescence,” from The Hounds of No (2005, Action Books)

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Alina, Do I talk about this a lot? Is it like I'm old and telling the same stories over and over again? If I say something like "this poem reminds of the Blood Brothers" am I repeating myself? I guess what I mean is it's viscerally surreal, it's ornate, it's excessive, it's dripping with something shining—jewels, various fluids, scales, molten rock. I have no critical faculties for work that hits me like this. It just registers as pure sensation. (Even the art on the cover of the book is like the art from Burn, Piano Island, Burn. What was in the water in the early '00s?) So enjoy the sensation. It can't be paraphrased. Love, Thomson (The Hounds of No is available from Small Press Distribution)

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Thomson, Emma & I recently interviewed Nicole for our podcast, as I know yr well-aware, but I'm not sure if you've actually heard the recording yet. I don't want to retread too much of that conversation here, in hopes of nudging you towards it. Plug aside, though, here's an admission: I don't read much literary criticism these days. That's partly to do w/ the fact that hearing someone read & talk about their work remains my favorite way of contextualizing anyone's poems. Though ​​contextualizing is not quite what I mean. Less to do with explaining, or 'getting it'. More like, ​​hearing you enhances my reading experience in some way. This is true of Nicole's poems especially: after hearing her read many times over the last few years,​ ​the poem-reader & poem-speaker have melded into a complete poem-persona, & it works exceptionally well. I've found myself reading her poems w/ her voice, cadence, & delivery style in my head. That's where a lot of poets who are totally capable on the page end up falling short, I think, so I'm always impressed by exceptions. (And okay, I'm thinking of the reading I went to last night, where someone totally read in Poet Voice &...) What I'm saying is, you should just skip my recording entirely (the self-imposed Hungover Reading curse strikes again) & listen to her do it. Somehow this became a mini-treatise about being impressed by Nicole's reading style. So, okay, real quick, a few more things I love about her poems, if yr still w/ me: how she subverts/examines/fucks with gendered language so deftly that you almost don't realize how difficult it is to not run aground into parody or pandering, how her humor carries you blissfully unaware toward some decidedly heavier truths (& how this shift happens seamlessly, like she can totally moodswing on a line break), how she gathers up quotidian blips & observations & snatches of pop culture & reveals their invisible through-lines in a way that makes you feel like you figured it out all by yourself. H​ow her poems are so witty & so clever, but let you in just as you are​. Love, Alina "I​'​d Kill for a Diet Pepsi" appears in the chapbook ​​Clever Little Gang (Furniture Press, 2014) ​​I’d Kill for a Diet Pepsi My ex says I made him feel like less of a man and I’m like, hahaha, what. I strut around with the world’s blame strapped to my chest like a badass bandolier or a satin pageant sash. I paint my nails, huff acetate fumes & hulk out at the corner bodega. No diet soda so I take down a stack of cans with a ninja-like roundhouse kick. They crash to the floor, noisy & unsuspecting victims of my rage. I’m my father’s daughter & just like him, I’ve never needed help, directions, or Viagra. All I do is party like it’s 1959— girls swooning and consuming every last inch of their cigarettes; filters stuck in their throats so every no translates to a sweet, placid yes. When I say yes, the earth jolts & gives way. The ground fucking crumbles to shit.

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Alina,

This month is something, isn't it? Part of that's how long the winter was—part of me keeps cringing, waiting for more snow to drop. I'm barely holding on myself. I want it all to get out of the way. Bring on summer.

Just found this poem—it felt like it belongs to this down mood, like it embraces it, welcomes it, even. It feels in defiance of the world. And it's got the cadence of a good catharsis, too. By the time it gets to the end, I wonder what's going to fall out of the sky. Yours, Thomson text: Horizon Scratch I open a black umbrella beneath the bare branches for the sky seems torn I open a black umbrella when you frown for everything around me is like a broken mirror I open a black umbrella under your hair for I'm wearing a hat that's been shredded a thousand, ten thousand times I open a black umbrella under the broken mirror for I need to hold up my shattered self I open a black umbrella when your nerves all stand up blue for the wet blue second hands spill out I open a black umbrella when plankton descends like fog for I'm hungry even if I eat and eat When a lit-up train goes by in the distance When your spit splatters onto my face When my younger sibling keeps vomiting in a faraway place When I suddenly want to buy a black piano and set it under the radiant sun When inside my dream someone shreds a black cloud to bits while uncoiled mattress springs jab me When my body begins to tremble uncontrollably white paper opens a white umbrella for my dirty writings are about to fall

tr. Don Mee Choi (Action Books, 2014)

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Thomson, Earlier today, Anselm Berrigan wrote on Facebook: "yes, the sky is very blue today, but only because it's crying" And I'm all I know, right? I've tried lots of walks, lots of crying, sage, orgasms, so much weed, a milkshake, cooking every vegetable in my fridge in turn, reading all my horoscopes (plus rising sign.) Ate a whole bag of clementines. Called my mom. Plus Eileen Myles! In the park, under so much sunlight!! My friend Sarah says that frivolous & bombastic action films are cathartic for her when she's bummed (I thought of you.) Found an emergency xanax in my purse, read this Anne Boyer poem instead. Felt better. Feeling better. April, what the fuck? xo, Alina poem text: http://muscovite.tumblr.com/post/143021129804

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Alina,

Two things off the bat—I doubt I said her name right, so forgive me my ignorance, and I read one bit of the poem wrong. It's not a tricky name, that's on me, but it is a tricky part of the poem. I think I read "She didn't know how to dress, so she was undressed," but the line is actually "She didn't know how to how to dress, so she was undressed"—there's a doubling that's easy to overlook until you're transcribing it from its book for tumblr.

And I was wrong too in what I said in the voicemail about this not being a research project. I googled the poem, found this paper (by Rosa Alcalá), and learned that today's poem is from de la Torre's first book, 2007's Talk Shows, and that, quoting Alcalá:

Two poems from this collection, "Bite Its Heart until It Learns," and "Poem in Spanish," are centos that bring together lines from several canonical Latin American poets, which she then translates into English.

So, uh, the more you know.

It had me from "...the sky like the rose rose but stone," that little duplication, that little stutter. It's stuff like that that I look for in poetry—or, at least, line-oriented poetry like this poem. Tiny barbs, or better yet, burrs, things that stick to you as you move through. And good, sharp turns that don't eject me from the flow—and this polyvocal poem has a ton of them. It's a jumbled core sample of poetic language, all the layers out of historical order and contaminated by the sampling techniques of the now (her translation).

On the other hand, I'm listening to "Squirrel Song" by Shellac right now, and Albini says "This isn't some kind of metaphor. God damn, this is real."

Love, Thomson

//

("Bite Its Heart until It Learns" can be found in Talk Shows, available from Switchback Books)

Bite Its Heart until It Learns

One doesn't know a thing about what poets, the blind, hookers, call "mystery." Nada. One can't say anything. My chest then my heart my senses in my chest your mouth your lips your teeth your tongue. The earth will keep spinning in its precise orbit. The earth that is the earth and the sky like the rose rose but stone. Conscience is bitterness. A tragic concept. Never did the sky have as many roads as this one. The road becomes diluted in the desolate shadow. Some words have the shade of a tree. When all the meat isn't meat anymore, nor the soul, let's return to the silence of words that come from silence. She didn't know how to how to dress, so she was undressed. A scream, at eleven, looking for a policeman. Look at my hands: transparent like light bulbs. That ray of light moving toward the bottom of the water. Between us and this century there will be free association of ideas despite our format. I don't think I betray my principles if I say without bad intentions that you have to have an ostrich stomach to swallow such filth. I bet nobody dares drink a cup of holy water.

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Thomson, ​​ ​I've been such a mope lately that I almost forgot it was spring. I'll have to talk to you about Haryette Mullen's work ​for real sometime, but Sunday at sundown is no such ​occasion​. ​Instead, a love poem. ​My cognitive functions seem real limited today beyond the basics, like head above water continues to be my main focus, but I know this feeling without having to think. I'm glad you're coming soon.​ love, Alina "Jump City" appears, funny enough, in a book called I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of Her Poems & His Poems Collected in Pairs. This is SO not where I first encountered it. text: ​JUMP CITY​ I feel a little jumpy around you. Like when I think a house has roaches, and I watch everything out the corner of my eye to see if it crawls away.

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Alina, I first read this poem yesterday—I liked it from the get-go, from the porcelain frog statues. The assemblage of imagery adds up to something that feels like a private language (you can feel the particularity of the life lived behind the poem, but you can't quite touch it—it pokes its head out far enough for it to see you, but not so far that you can cleanly make out its shape). The father, the mother, Mousehead, Electra, Tim McGraw—they together combine into an extended family that knocks the I around in a slippery mess and leaves it confused but intact and somewhat tougher than before. Katy's stuff is violent in a very nonstandard and intricate way, and you know how much I like violence. Hope it strikes something in you, too. Yours, Thomson

text: from "Himalayan Salt Lamp" Father gets into my cabinet and coats himself in Vaseline to throw himself rolling toward my porcelain frog statues. I get sucked into a pool of my mother’s spit but luckily Mousehead is a humanist so he dives in front of the glass amphibians, saving my life. I pull myself from the drool pit; my thighs are red. I ask Father why he’s come back so many times from the grave, if he’s come to make me pee on his knee again and regret what I have done. He parts my hair from his face pores. I’m all spacey, all Electra, all needy for dark hole abandonment, Daddy girl softball star humping teddy bears and singing Tim McGraw. Father’s face is empty once I come to; my hair is all over the floor. The blood I’m made of coats his pitiful face like a strawberry glaze.  

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​Thomson,

​I think of Sonya & Gala-- whose work I read to you from earlier this week-- as two​ very​ distinct ​faces of the same brilliant moon. ​​Reading Sonya's work is like descending rapturously into a fairytale realm-- the proper kind, w/ shadows & thorns all along the edges. Except over & again, you realize that the world they conjure here is too grotesque & too sensitively-rendered to be anything but the one we're living in. T​hese poems pair​ best​ w​/​ Nick Cave records, myrrh, & my melancholic tendencies, which are ​often in want of a ​velvety spot ​to rest. Love, Alina

​"A girl's guide to adventuring" appears in Salt is for Curing (Sator Press, 2015)​ A girl's guide to adventuring ​I​ never regret because I’m never wrong; the roads diverged in a wood and who went where why before is irrelevant I got my axe and it’s into the thicket, legs scratched up bloody & nothing but blueberries to eat for months That’s just how it is: I didn’t make the rules, and I don’t mind them You have to start somewhere and I start with “no,” so it’s heart-first into the forest And if you come upon a wolf, you go by And if you come upon an oracle, you go by And if you come upon a cabin, doors-open, fires-lit, arms-welcoming, eternity up in your nostrils like homecoming and promises and good bread and wine, you go by because blueberries aren’t as bad as all that and I’m never wrong, or lie.

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Alina, In your last note, you mentioned discussions you've had—some w/ me, even—about what brought us to poetry. And yeah, in my case, it was "conceptualism": never read poetry before, never had much interest in it, but there was something about conceptualism's total obedience to form that seemed really post-punk to me—specifically, it reminded me of the band Wire, whom I dearly love. The way the poetry writes itself, propelled by some inhuman drive. What'd Williams say—"a poem is a little machine made of words?" I like that very much. There's something pyrotechnic about a poem conceived under constraints that seems VERY human to me—what's more human than obsession? Words bleed by themselves, regardless of how dry or wry the animating impulse behind their assemblage, or how alienated they are from their origins. Which is to say, it's OK to have no heart. "I'd rather hang out here and feel something real," you wrote yesterday. Me, too. "Reality is," as Philip K. Dick once said, "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." And reality, in this poem, is the "cold place" under the heart where "water rushes opposite gravity"—a geyser, a fountain, a well-spring, a basically geological source of inspiration that flows regardless of human will, intention, feeling. "The moment when you've breathed in all the air you can breathe" and then you breathe in more, and crack, expanded and partially destroyed by what you've absorbed, what you've removed from circulation, confined to your body, your self, incorporated into your being. "There's a sense of discovery / But it's not sentimental," writes Pollari. What is it, then? I think it's the death drive. Pure obsession, pure mood. The same force that finds us propped awake long into the night by the glow of a screen, clicking link after link, dissolving into the world, losing that boundary between human and inhuman, detecting the conspiracies—"Illuminati videos"—that set any and everything in motion. The truth is, it's OK to have no heart. The world will speak through you for you. And whether or not we survive the experience isn't up to us. Love, Thomson (Dead Horse is available from Birds, LLC)

text:

IT’S OK TO HAVE NO HEART

Deep under the muscle Is one cold place A diuretic place Where the water rushes opposite gravity

Like, you know what it is about something leaving you Really leaving you

The moment when you’ve breathed in all the air you can breathe And then you take in one more sip, and something breaks a little In your sternum There you are Breathing a little less easy Inhaling a little more shaky

Uneasily watching Illuminati videos on YouTube Getting real weird and down For you my audience If you are still with me, I want To tell you what it will be like when it leaves There’s a sense of discovery But it’s not sentimental You’ll find Something hidden But most of you will die

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Our training dictates that we've gotta always refer to 'the speaker', right, but Gina's poems are so utterly human that it feels like a disservice to discuss the perceptive person who guides you through them at any remove. I tore through Hold it Down when I read it last year​;​ finishing it felt like getting off the phone w/ ​a really perceptive friend. Her work grew on me immediately because it's clear-eyed & empathetic, but not prescriptive. Intimate, but not insular. Realist​ & unsparing in that realism​, but not utterly hopeless​ either—I think that's what impresses me the most​. ​I've had lots of discussions/arguments before— some w/ you, even— about what brought me to poetry, what keeps me there. If I can speak in binaries for a moment: I think I said something about how I find conceptualism, formal inventiveness, etc. interesting (sometimes; if I could wink, I would here) but it never sticks past my initial, "Ah, I see what you did there" response. No shelf life​. Or at least, I get the sense that poetry w/o humanity feels bloodless, as though it comes from a place of never having anything real to worry about. As opposed to work that is immediately accessible to the reader & its difficulty/complexity lies not in ​obfuscation or, I dunno, fucking w/ form, but in the unseen labor of the poet translating complex feelings & experiences into something that looks casual, seamless, because it chooses a language that ​we can all​ understand. ... Which is to say, ​I'd rather hang out here & feel something real. xo, Alina "Hold It Down" appears in Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013) text: Hold It Down

It's 70 degrees outside but in the drugstore Christmas music plays over the speakers as I stand in line balancing my checkbook in my head, stretching things thin until my next paycheck when the rent is due. The security guard cracks a joke, but I wasn't paying attention, so I just smile & step forward in line. Images move across the screen. When I think about money it seems impossible. All over the country people are moving into the streets & we're here in Atlanta starting a new life. Darkness surrounds the latest revision of our shared history. Everything clouded. Yesterday 1 couldn't tear myself from the news & already today the events have been distorted, the numbers downplayed. It's late fall & in the early morning crispness, the leaves fall from the trees & cover the sidewalks. This new feeling we lack a name for, struggle manifested in the streets & in parks & on bridges across the nation. The headlines read "Protesters clash with police," but as we watched the live stream, we saw aggression only by officers dressed in riot gear. We saw people tossed on the ground, hit with batons, a woman punched in the face, an eighty-four year old woman's face drenched in pepper spray. The images endless in this land of the free. I'm losing focus, distracted by the newsfeed on the computer screen, hitting refresh. The cat paws at my leg, demands its own attention. This shift entirely unexpected but necessary. Leaves blot the window. Every so often I leave & start from scratch, imagine damaged relationships & sick cities where there was no damage & no sickness greater than anywhere else. In Atlanta, everyone drives. The bartender called us "hardcore" when we said we'd walked there. She said, "No one in Atlanta walks anywhere." Walking home from work in post-daylight savings time darkness I pass no one on the sidewalks. I pass the traffic backed up by the stoplight. The weekend passes too quickly— I wish it would last longer, which is what this all is really about: time & my lack of control over it, my inability to do what I want with it. And there's a greater futility at work here too—a greater frustration in my inability to control my environment or to stop my country from killing its citizens. The police beat people standing still, linking arms, holding cardboard signs. Each day I think more & more about the past, about where things began to go wrong, where I, too, began to go wrong. Before I moved, before I got sick, before I unfriended you on Facebook, before I decided I no longer loved you, before New York, before college—thinking back to childhood when we could run fearless through the neighborhood at night, when we didn't think about the future, when we loved our country because we didn't know better.