Junk Read online

MATTER and WATER IS LIFE and TRANS LIVES MATTER and

  PUSSY GRABS BACK and then we got a drink and for a couple

  hours it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream

  As if the fog lifted and we could hear thru the static Feel the

  sun again But it’s only growing colder This is just the beginning

  And the path back from complacency is lion mane I was afraid a

  long time before these days We talk about Athena Farrokhzad

  and palimpsest and what can you even believe We talk about

  illness in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and a sudden awareness of our

  fingertips We talk abt the Origin of “Obligation” Latin obligatus

  meaning “bound” and the stem obligate which in biology means

  an organism restricted to a particular condition of life Which

  originates in the Latin ob + ligatus, past participle ligare which

  means to tie or to bind Ligate in English to tie up as if in surgery

  The agent a ligature which in typography means when 2 letters

  are tied into a single character like a & e to æ or & which is the

  Latin e + t which in Latin means “and” like in et al or et cetera,

  etcetera Which, ligatures and abbreviations, have been around

  since the innovation of the written word bc time is money and

  the earliest forms of writing were 4 accounting as in how much

  grain in yr silo or yr pyramid if yr a historical revisionist There

  are times when I look above and beyond Dissociation: thank you

  for keeping me sane and alive when when when I needed you

  Smell of warm bread baking in the 5AM But now I’m looking to

  connect & inhabit more than I want 2 slip away Crunchy chocolate

  granola Cliff bars Staring at our fingernails I’m building the

  archive of a life that shouldn’t exist, while it still does Bathroom

  bills Running into the drummer ex-boyfriend with his guitarist

  bf and they get yr name wrong Wristband from that gay club in

  Cartagena where we danced w/ the self-proclaimed Perez Hilton

  of Colombia Every bar frankly should have tostones smellin up

  the grill Having made out with the server at the vegan resto @ a

  Tuesday gay karaoke night Is a poem about Junk itself merely

  an accumulation of doomsday and birth certificates If part of

  Junk is letting go, partly Junk is letting go of you Junk finds a

  new boo I am the standard of my mind Smoke pulls back

  into the fire and the fire pulls back into the Junk and the Junk

  pulls up to the bumper, baby We lie quiet in the buff, not touchin

  MORE PRAISE FOR

  TOMMY PICO

  “Funny and honest and wickedly clever.”

  —SHERMAN ALEXIE

  “Pico is a poet of canny instincts, his lyric is somehow so casual and so so serious at the same time. He is determined to blow your mind apart, and . . . you should let him.”

  —ALEXANDER CHEE

  “Mix of hey that’s poetry (uncanny resistance) with hey that’s a text and smashing goals & fulfilling them along the way & saying my parents fulfilled them. Doing it differently being alive & an artist. I love this work. Unpredictable & sweet & strong to continue.”

  —EILEEN MYLES

  “The self-conscious labor of these poems explores a culture of asides, stutters, stammers, and media glitches. It’s no wonder Tommy Pico manages to name and claim identity while also reminding us of his (and our!) limitlessness.”

  —JERICHO BROWN

  “A poet who will not hesitate calling out winter as a death threat from nature, Tommy Pico hears the wild frequencies in the mountains and rivers of cities. The marriage of extraordinary sharp writing with the most astute commentary on almost every possible thing a human will feel, think, do, dance like, or smell like.”

  —CACONRAD

  “On the narrowing frontier between song & speech, memory & oblivion, future & no future, Native & American, IRL is Heraclitan, a river of text and sweat, whipping worlds into the silence of white pages: a new masterpiece. And a new kind of masterpiece. It’s a lyric epic of desire whose hero renounces heroism.”

  —ARIANA REINES

  “A gleeful combination of exuberance and threat.”

  —SIMONE WHITE

  “Pico centers his second book-length poem on the trap of conforming to identity stereotypes as he ponders his reluctance to write about nature as a Native American . . . In making the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review

  “[Nature Poem] finds Pico incorporating or indirectly referencing his surroundings in freewheeling, intimate verse, while turning a humorous lens on life as a queer man.”

  —OUT MAGAZINE

  “Humor lays the groundwork for a hard truth and, for poet Tommy Pico, that hard truth is about living as an indigenous person in occupied America. . . . Pico’s poetry builds a contemporary Native American persona, one that occupies multiple spaces simultaneously: New York City, the internet, pop music, and Grindr. It’s an identity that’s determined to be heard by the culture at large.”

  —THE ORGANIST/KCRW

  “Instead of following the conventions of the pastoral tradition, in which nature is revered, Pico adopts a tragicomic view. On the one hand, the land of his native people can be described with great reverence, desert nights that ‘chill and sparkle and swoon with metal/ lighting up the dark universe.’ On the other, that same landscape carries and extends legacies of racism and genocide that Pico is determined not to forget.”

  —THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Pico has pulled me out of a poetry slump. His poems make me want to live with more poetry, to read, write, and revel in poetry as a form that does not have to be a container.”

  —BROOKLYN MAGAZINE

  “Few people capture New York, queerness, and the artful use of hashtags in a poem quite like Tommy Pico.”

  —NYLON

  AUTHOR PHOTO © NIQUI CARTER

  TOMMY “TEEBS” PICO is author of the books IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), and Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry, 2016 Tin House Scholar, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2017 Literature Prize, and received a Whiting Award in 2018. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. His Myers Briggs is IDGAF.

  @heyteebs

  Copyright © 2018 Tommy Pico

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pico, Tommy, author.

  Title: Junk / by Tommy Pico.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018002485| ISBN 9781941040973 (paperback) |

  ISBN 9781941040980 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3616.I288 J86 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002485

  First US Edition 2018

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

    Tommy Pico, Junk