Nature Poem Read online

  the box back in my backpack before he gets back NBD crisis

  averted earth

  a golden orbit of simplicity.

  My primary device is personification, says Nature. Do your associations consider my mercurial elements?

  Nature is kind of over my head

  the speech sweeps inland is overtaking

  Nature keeps wanting to hang out, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the phrase “hackles of the night” but you can’t always get what you want.

  Every date feels like the final date bc we always find small ways of being extremely rude to each other, like mosquito bites or deforestation

  like I think I’m in an abusive relationship w/nature

  then again I think I’m in an abusive relationship w/myself, I whisper after pinching my squishy belly

  but for reals I leave yr apt in the early train of my hangover thinking that was a weird bump like all jostled but back on the open road

  then like clockwork u txt two days later sayin, greetings from the Pines—you free Tuesday night?

  and I’m both charmed and suspicious, which is probably redundant, and also the soil of my landscape and a landing strip.

  I don’t like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me suspect there is a god.

  Monumental bowl of ash overtaking hikers, for example—the cloud’s arms sweep down the mountainside

  a gasp from the mouth of natural wonder, eyes peel toward the sky

  like memory

  Agreed. A greed. Aahhh. Greed.

  God wants everything, n I’m like God—you, I’m sorry, but you are too much of a time commitment. I have a work thing. It’s not you, it’s me.

  God is wearing short shorts and demands worship, n I’m like God, yr balls are showing!!!

  I’m trying to explain this very slowly.

  My friend Jesus works at a dispensary. In the waiting room, they have one of those ball lightning things. Plasma globe. Makes everyone feel like Storm. Whatever keeps stoners staring

  is the only kind of nature I could bear.

  We are the last animal to arrive in the kingdom—even science will tell you that.

  My father takes me into the hills we cut sage. He tells me to thank the plant for its sacrifice, son. Every time I free a switch of it a burst of prayer for every leaf.

  I’m swoll on knowing this? Sharing the pride of plants

  My mother waves at oak trees. A doctor delivers her diagnosis.

  When she ascends the mountains to pick acorn, my mother motherfucking waves at oak trees. Watching her stand there, her hands behind her back, rocking, grinning

  into the face of the bark—

  They are talking to each other.

  I am nothing like that, I say to my audience.

  I say, I went to Sarah Lawrence College

  I make quinoa n shit

  Once on campus I see a York Peppermint Pattie wrapper on the ground, pick it up, and throw it away. Yr such a good Indian says some dick walking to class. So,

  I no longer pick up trash.

  I want to be the one who eats the candy

  at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibit, not the one splashing his face with cold water in the bathroom

  but we r who we r

  like jambalaya.

  Let’s say I was raised on television and sugar and exhausted parents working every job that poked its head from the tall grasses of opportunity

  who didn’t go to college but still read poetry to each other and wrote songs and made sculptures and read law documents at the beach while I threw like seaweed on my cousins

  but opportunity to what?

  My current envy list includes ppl who make decisions, in general. Envy is a shit tit. I meet a boy and I miss him. Time, a paragon of confidence, taps me on the shoulder and asks

  if I get legit anxiety when someone calls from a number I don’t know, cos it’s like—who still calls?

  I’ve always wanted to know, I say, why they call you Father

  You can’t reflect and decide at the same time. If language is a structure born of the desire to communicate, can I really be blamed when Money says anxiety is only real when the face breaks and I’m chipping like paint?

  I shoot thru yr stupid sky like a stupid sky

  You are like the third convertible in a row or like seafoam socks in the fat far rockaways

  I can’t look you in the eye and listen

  at the same time. Yr not stupid at all, you say things like “the skin of art,” but here with me in the back of this margarita—you must be very, very stupid

  Ppl here wear stupid shirts that button all the way up to the top of the tower, and inevitably fall

  I look too much into the mirror of my worst self

  so life feels like always breakin in a pair of new shoes

  and my hunch is we’ll be naked soon having sex like those handsoaps that smell like parsley sort of refreshing but chemical Nothing like the real thing n you wd prolly notice if we fucked with all my clothes on bc yr of course so hazel

  and stupid.

  Nothing can fall that wasn’t built

  except maybe my self-esteem bc I have a hunch that I was born with it intact but then America came smacked

  me across the face said like it

  n the sick thing is getting smacked across the face makes me so wet rn

  and that’s prolly why poetry, bc in order to get inside

  a poem has to break you

  the way the only thing more obvious than your body

  is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.

  The perigee moon haloes the white comforter in a Beyoncé way.

  You shine like a bar of soap in the shadows.

  The perigee moon is above both of us, in Portland, in NYC, in San Diego, in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Guaynabo, Sri Lanka

  Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight

  and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades—

  This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.

  Everyone is looking for their stupid soulmate rn

  Sade likens dating to war, says she’s on the front lines

  which is also a kind of hunger. Really, I just see teeth

  or a desert—u know yr thirsty

  when you wonder does the bartender think I’m cute, or is he tryin to get a tip?

  but that’s the wilds for you.

  Everyone wants to know where can they meet a good guy

  then wants to go to a gay bar on Saturday night.

  I’m cool with contradictions, but don’t lie to yrself—

  Hope

  is a charred skeleton

  of a house visible from a road that snakes

  through the valley of memory

  where fig trees burst from the ground like throaty laughter.

  Winter, like thirst, is one of nature’s ultimate burns

  implicit in which is the analogy of touching a hot stovetop.

  I’m tired of astrology and bffs

  saying Find the spring

  bc spring is an asshole, getting yr hopes n temps up then plunging like self-esteem. Plus it’s nearly half-terrifying to show again the sea of my body

  and yet

  I like the way my head shivers

  restin on yr stomach when you say If I keep hanging out w/u I’m gonna get a six pack

  from laughing.

  Like poison oak or the Left Eye part in “Waterfalls”

  you become a little bit of everything you brush

  against. Today I am a handful of raisins and abt 15 ppl on the water taxi.

  When my dad texts me two cousins dead this week, one 26 the other 30, what I’m really trying to understand is what trainers @ the gym mean when they say “engage” in the phrase “engage your core”

  also “core”

  restless terms batted back and forth.

  Rest is a sign of necrosis. Life is a cycle of jobs. The biosphere is alive

  with menthol smoke and
my unchecked voicemails. I, for one, used to believe in God

  and comment boards

  I wd say how far I am from my mountains, tell you why I carry Kumeyaay basket designs on my body, or how freakishly routine it is to hear someone died

  but I don’t want to be an identity or a belief or a feedbag. I wanna b me. I want to open my arms like winning a foot race and keep my stories to myself, I tell my audience.

  Grief is sneaking cigs from the styrofoam cups on the tables next to the creamers and plates of Mary’s pineapple upside-down cake, running off to the playground behind the schoolroom trailers to (try and) smoke them

  We were supposed to grow old together, hold down food, run for cover, give birth.

  Body the job

  was to keep breathing.

  the fabric of our lives #death

  some ppl wait a lifetime for a moment like this #death

  reach out and touch someone #death

  he kindly stopped for me #death

  kid-tested, mother-approved #death

  oops, I did it again #death

  it keeps going, and going, and going #death

  I’m lovin it #death

  because you’re worth it #death

  the best a man can get #death

  maybe she’s born with it #death

  a whole new world #death

  high, flying, adored #death

  be all that you can be #death

  It’s . . . Alive!!! #death

  the freshmaker #death

  stick a fork in me #death

  when you’ve got it, flaunt it #death

  why you gotta be so rude #death

  the best part of wakin up #death

  it’s morphin time #death

  hello, is it me you’re looking for? #death

  just do it #death

  Got #death

  he can get it #death

  what’s the 411, son #death

  takes a lickin and keeps on tickin #death

  hang in there, baby #death

  mr. big stuff, who do you think you are #death

  solid as a rock #death

  all day, every day #death

  rude boy #death

  yr givin me fever #death

  that’s the way love goes #death

  almost doesn’t count #death

  hosted by Neil Patrick Harris #death

  yr not the boss of me #death

  clever girl #death

  o say can u see #death

  shots shots shots shots shots shots #death

  AngelNafis: ‘Do Right Woman’ is literally a church pew. #Aretha

  heyteebs: I can’t even hear the first three notes of that intro w/o getting misty

  AngelNafis: it’s basically mathematics. Aretha plus a person having any sliver of a soul whatsoever equalz holy-feelz.

  heyteebs: gaia is alive in those pipes

  AngelNafis: LOL listening now im almost stressed out by what an opposite of an alien she is. not from outerspace but rather, THE CORE OF EARTH

  heyteebs: can I reproduce this twitter convo in nature poem plz

  AngelNafis: only if u eulogize me when I DIE SHORTLY AFTER

  heyteebs: Don’t Play That Song 70s TV version is basically an argument for thermodynamics

  AngelNafis: ‘Call Me’ is to be played at my funeral/graduation/birthday cake cutting ritual/baptism/when i walk down the aisle

  AngelNafis: listening to it right now and am more river than a river

  heyteebs: omg this is a song abt friendship all the YOUs, but cd also b a polyamorous anthem?

  AngelNafis: the thought of a polyamorous anthem EXHAUSTS me. FRANDS it has to be.

  heyteebs: Do Right Truth

  if the spark is elemental

  if the phase changes

  the first thing we noticed was your eyes your big eyes looking right at us

  if infusing the valley with yrself

  if light is over

  whelming

  if a crumple of heavy human in the careful hair

  the birds I forgot abt the birds says auntie out from lockup

  if vapor

  if the carapace

  the universe whirs its ghost of TV snow

  if I pick my nose

  if I see a flannel

  if I was your girl

  all the things I’d do to you

  I’m going to be so sad when Aretha Franklin dies.

  Stars are characters

  in the tome of the night sky, which I shd work more at deciphering but no

  I’ll just sit here and think abt the sequel to A Beautiful Mind I just invented called A Ugly Bag

  and literally can’t stop giggling to myself in the cool quiet office like it’s bad like it’s a high school math test someone farted situation

  Tracing shapes in the stars is the closest I get to calling a language mine:

  The Ripening Mango. Three Snaps in a Z Formation. Amy Winehouse.

  Naming is basic and audacious, a claim

  My ideal power-couple name is TomCula bc I’m pretty sure that ancient horror faggot could get it, plus I’m into upward mobility, know my way around caskets, and wd love to mist myself thru doors

  I sit in the cool quiet office and invent myself some laughs in an attempt to maneuver from a sticky kind of ancestral sadness, bein a NDN person in occupied America, and the magic often works

  until I think why is it so damn hard to spell maneuver and why does it always look wrong my great grandparents had almost no contact

  with white ppl like the shutter of a poem is the only place where I can illusion myself some authority

  Everyone remembers the weather when discovering a body.

  I think it’s perfectly natural to look skyward.

  Body

  All of yr flecks, flakes n gurgles? Ew.

  I sweat. I tell myself it’s just what bodies do.

  I have chicken fingers for breakfast.

  My cousins have cirrhosis.

  Body

  I am not my body. Get me out of here.

  When you grow up around funerals, you learn pretty quick a body in a casket is bloated but somehow still sunk—A waxy calm. Where was the person who’d gone

  My family was like a reservation Six Feet Under—parents sang the old Spanish songs, Kumeyaay birdsongs, church songs, led prayers at every NDN funeral from here to Yuma. Gila Bend. Tucson. “Funeral” was the first game my brother played. I’d turn to my cousins wonder which of us wd make it to old age.

  Watch him take their feelings, said mom in the hospital waiting room as my father held hands with the weeping family. He slowly bent into the grief above them, spoke on the dead and began weeping, too. Now watch, she said, how relieved the room gets.

  Even some jokes? He stays heavy tho

  Her voice, a sail in the darkness.

  Revulsion, I thought, was abt self-esteem but now I think might be a warning.

  Solution to the problem of having a body.

  Body: don’t get too attached to me

  Science predicts we’ll discover alien life by 2025

  Dudes’ legs on the subway are constantly spreading

  Nature asks aren’t I curious abt the landscapes of exoplanets—which, I thought we all understood planets are metaphors

  like the Vikings, or Delaware

  The night sky yawns over the city, indistinct

  but for the spell

  Miss Night Sky of my childhood was darkest toward the desert, where her features chill and sparkle and swoon with metal

  lighting up the dark universe

  I wanted to stop looking up and start marching forward

  like a metaphor

  NDN teens have the highest rate of suicide of any population group in America. A white man can massacre 9 black ppl in a church and be fed Burger King by the cops afterward. A presidential candidate gains a platform by saying Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists

  It’s hard for me to imagine curiosity as any
thing more than a pretext for colonialism

  so nah, Nature I don’t want to know the colonial legacy of the future.