#soham patel

[lifeinpoetry]

Keep awe bare like sound at night.

— Soham Patel, from “Mixed with always:” published in Poem-a-Day

[thelightjournals]

We always become mysterious— birds at the end of each evening. Whoever does the telling stops time like a crescendo

Soham Patel, Mixed with always:

[bibliomancyoracle]

For the record to be a hit: it also has to be disposable.

*

from “song:” by Soham Patel

[carrieabigstick]

A Review of Banango Street's All Women's Issue, Edited by Emily Kendal Frey and Julia Cohen

Heather* is late for his conference. I have been in the habit of grabbing the biggest cup for coffee at the shitty gas station down the street. The guy behind me tells the cashier, whose nails are always wild and long and decorated, he’s SO MAD AT HEATHER ABOUT THE CARROT CAKE. While I wait for Heather, I settle into coffee / poetry bathing. The cup is “a huge screen at the edge of the room.” It is “a bit basement” in that it makes me feel like I’m able to hide in the library, this room full of brand new shoes and studded hats and writing center consultants watching youtube videos of FIRE. “What is an act of poetry,” asks Eileni Sikelianos. I think it is my constant return to the gas station, to the cup, to the uncertainty I always have about what I should do in between classes, in between the margins of “blue-evening-light dresses.” These poems remind me of something I have tried to explain in class. The possibility for the small word to blow up / the iceberg / the privately owned russian rocket in the sky. “I can pluck and pluck,” says Sikelianos to Heather, wherever he is. The possibility for the largest concept, for the unreachable, to suddenly feel plush, is here: “Sappho, how’s it going?” I, suddenly, have the distinct feeling like I’ve dreamed of Sikelianos before. We rode in a limo and ate popsicles. We were “leaping out of that terrible habitat,” or screaming through the moonroof. 

I misread a line in Cynthia Arrieu-King & Hillary Gravendyk’s “Cautionary Arrow" as, ”Is there a word for when you pull / a nail out of a wall?” as “Is there a word for when you pull / a nail out of a wolf?” Heather isn’t sure she is using the text right. We talk about what it means to afford something a necessary amount of complexity, what it means to refuse received language. There’s another student, Heather, who can’t spell piano, who can’t make any sentence coherent, and I want. I want / I have desires for him to be able to make sentences / not on the world’s terms / but on his / and to have them be understandable / radiating. ”We grow old and find / our hearts in a series of removals. A grid with each box / erased, the paper soft as tissue paper. But we know what we want.” Heather tells me school is his favorite place today in class. I can’t help it / how much I have desires for Heather to be able to voice his complexity further / or more / or continuously / or in new places / or to have all the power that has been denied to him / that he deserves.

There is a boy and a girl in the class with the same name (Heather). The boy wrote in his I Remember paper (based on Joe Brainard’s I Remember) that he had a crush on the girl with his name. Today his girlfriend, who is not the girl who has the same name as him, found me in the library. He was going to be late. I told her his conference was actually a couple days from now. I tapped the schedule. I realize how little I know about their lives. How close I feel to knowing something. How scared I feel / driving home / to face my own life / my lack of a life / my exhaustion / and sometimes, weeping. 

"Crybaby Bridge," Kathy Goodkin: 

"Her skeleton when I kill her is a plastic water bottle,” says Lindsey Webb / a sunflower / a sunflower that studs the rain. What it means to be crushed / explosively / or delicately. As if you were gathered to be crushed. Heather tried out Heather’s new scooter and cut himself. He sits down and bleeds. He gets up and grabs disinfectant from the writing consultant’s table, rubs it into the wound while we talk about Whitman. “a flooded church.” I tell him he should take a poetry class from my boyfriend, Heather, next semester when he transfers to FSU. I tell him, soon, we’re going to go outside / and live / take measurements of the weird way blossoming occurs here. Across the street, a small burst of white dangles onto the tendons / of light / the electric lines. “Being a round chamber, I emit a low / series of vibrations.” 

"I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened", is a beast Hajara Quinn says. I listen to Blood Orange's "It Is What It Is” over and over while I read the poem. I lay in the bed / in the middle of the bed / last Saturday / and told my boyfriend that I’m worried I’m depressed / that I know I’m depressed / in a vein / clipped with ice or steam / that I’m in love but horrifically / exhausted / unable to collapse in / release / A Garden / because I'm so rattled / unpaid still by one place. As we walk into Winn Dixie, I tell Heather I meant what I said / that I am sad / in a difficulty of sadness / unable to balance adjuncting / with 

_________________________ happiness  Not a factual brink Not a smoking quibble Not a barn collapsing Not unused implements or a hammer’s bass

God, Khadijah Queen, do I love that drag in the title. God, do I live there // ?? 

I don’t want him to worry. I’m sad / but not undone / not unwilling to find / to be found. You are brave, Heather says, with just some glass in his mouth. We buy gummi worms / beer. 

"What is understood to be susceptible," says Heather Napualani Hodges poem, "Each Love is a Selfish Love."  Language, I say, to my class of Heathers, is a beast / an animal that can, suddenly, be the thing that kills you. I mean this to be, I say, a great source of energy. What if Language were alive? "I’ve loved most everything in my life incorrectly," says Heather Napualani Hodges to my class of Heathers. Everyone turns over their papers. They are done with their quiz. 

Heather sits down. Her pregnant friend who drove her here is nearby, stretching. Sometimes on the drive home, at the stop lights, I put my one foot out the window, stretching. Sometimes, I scream out, ANIMAL CHALLENGE. Heather is worried that to effectively address her argument, she will have to introduce conspiracy theories. I tell her, for this paper, there can only be one source. Oozy woods, is how Shelly described the coral in the sea. As it first emerged, parts of the world. Oozy woods, my body so slowly wrecked in it, a raw glint. "A story, to represent the truth. / It’s supposed to help,” says Kate Greenstreet. What did I say in my status. I always imagine Greenstreet is made of deer. I meant that. 

Heather's nails are painted the same color as her t-shirt. This is the only time I really get to see many of them up close. I like that / about this. It “queers the feminine fleshed / revival so nicely,” says Soham Patel's "song:". I’m terrified I’m growing stupid / not reading as much as I’m used to / not writing as much as I’m used to. I don’t mean that in a sense of / wanting to bathe in the sun. I want to see my face / to make sense of its movement / my own intimacy / where it is was / or is / lapping. ”resonances / surprise some power holders holding no standard—from the gutter / in my glitter girl excess and frame,” says the poem, licking my wrist.  

I drive in the dark. I can’t believe how different it becomes / crossing the state lines (Florida-Georgia). Sometimes I drive with my boot stuck out the window because sometimes I fear I am becoming a cowardly person. "Suddenly I’m a cowardly person," says Yona Wallach as translated by Linda Zisquit. It is important, though, that the title is only “Suddenly I Become.” I will survive this and not consider it a weakness that I have worded it as such. Though I know there is more out there / blades / slicked sheets.

"RE: RE: yr a raccoon.” A few days ago, I wrote you an email / in the hope that it might reach you. A few days ago, the police swarmed our place looking for an intruder that had been squatting at the abandoned home across the street. The woman below us, let's call her Heather, says she saw a pizza being delivered there. Heather tells me, since our class, she can't stop using the word chartreuse. Alex Niemi joins us in “committing black magic with a chartreuse word / by the paint cans." How do we create boundaries, I ask the class. What does it mean for us to be broken into? 

Sometimes I think about drinking / with the adjuncting / the problem of the rock meeting the flow / a coursing over. I am wary / careful. Heather adjusts the camouflage strap on his sunglasses. "In the drinking I believed things," says Hannah Brooks-Motl. Heather's attention getter in his intro paragraph is something about how we gauge the consequences of a potential mistake before it happens and how that gauging cedes once we’ve been caught / and the consequences simply become real. “The ancient way kept complexity from hands.” What is this, Heather screeched during the movie. What is this supposed to be? I wore all black today, to the conferences, to class. I don’t know. All black / the stop light / the wrap light. Sometimes, I told Heather, you have to bury yourself / leave yourself / dug in. 

Fred Moten says, Fred Moten says, Fred Moten says, that when you are born at sea. Oh deep / slit clenching. Mourn something / or with urgency. Oh Koch $ / flooding into education. “The system has recovered from a serious error,” says Dana Levin. 

"Hey Mrs. Lorig This is Heather, I got your email," says Heather. "I'll be there at 2:00." She signs it, "Ars longa vita brevis," which means "Art is long / Life is short." Heather won’t look me in the eye when we talk in person. "she is happier / in this poem not looking at the sky,” says Katie Mertz. How long do I look at you / proximity? How long do I look into you / cut off bullet vial? I put our black cat, Heather, on my lap, and I quote Keats for her, “All say / that ye may love / in spite of beaver hats.” 

I haven't made time for running. I worry / my softness. I stand at the sink and grip my self. I worry / my softness. Constellated foam, I think, looking for the car in the parking lot. "Big Myths were present," Sara Sutter's poem utters to the squirrels loose in the galaxy. Next week I will go to a workshop meant to teach me how to fill out learning outcome paperwork. For each paper, you fill in the bubbles accordingly / the bubbles that reflect the intensity to which goals were met. I ask a student, what she imagines the jungle feels like. "Overwhelming / layers," she says. I nod.

"Nowife Makes a New Skin," Bronwyn Valentine:

I forgot Bhanu. How did I forget Bhanu? I will combine her and Ana Božičević. Few people / are a bending or soft statue / a forest / a city of skin / as these two are. It is time for the onslaught / the barrage / the inner tube slaughter. "Is this a magazine," Bhanu asks. It is. It is not. It is a crystal bouquet, I say. It is "[l]ike I'm not from a different time," says Božičević / inside the floating flowers / the unexcused gorge. I see in terms of unexplained desert. I see in terms of encroachment. Each week, I cry some. There is a question of (my) uselessness / that is to come / that comes. “Melissa, café. This unrecorded life. Small ecosystems where we don’t see what’s being destroyed or what’s emerging. Acts that don’t reproduce. A question of uselessness. (Bataille.) Melissa brings the coffee and then the cream, in a little jar," says the rouge notebook. "You're right to despise / And fear imagining. / Stay in the rot," is sometimes the Božičević I want to scream / do scream / to the nothing in the field / the small burst that tears away. "That shakes in windy weather / above the rusty heather," says Christina Rossetti in the middle of the Goblin Market. Poetry, you cannot leave me. Pigments, please tie me to the cliff / leave me there floating. "Floating," says Božičević. "The inability to perform it,"says Bhanu, floating while lying down. Please know I miss you, is what I think when I fold the jewel in half. When I watch it crush me.

<3 / "Shitting Flowers**",

C

*All my students are named Heather. 

**Sara Sutter. Also, this symbol * looks like a shitting flower. 

Take us out, shitting flowers. 

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