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language: English
country: USA
year: 2017
form: poetry
dates read: 17.2.25-18.2.25
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.
Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Nature Poem is a delight. the premise is — to be honest — a bit cutesy, a self-conscious refusal to write a Nature Poem (capital N, capital P), both as a rejection of the boundaries imposed on Indigenous writers (indeed, Indigenous people) and, perhaps more importantly, as a matter of personal taste: “I can’t write a nature poem / bc I only fuck with the city”
Get in, loser—we’re touring landscapes of the interior. In the mist
of words: the plume the matter the radiant energy
of course, it is also a nature poem (if not a Nature Poem), but the coyness didn’t bother me, because it is also a bunch of other things at the same time: an ambivalent celebration-critique of urban queer life (it reminded me more strongly than I think any other English-language text I’ve read of Manuel Tzoc’s poetry, with a side of Ian Iqbal Rashid; also perhaps Cason Sharpe), a poetic testament to Kumeyaay survival and grief in the face of an ongoing genocide, a meditation on poetics and USAmerican literary culture, a bitter reflection on the extent to which the speaker has been unwillingly dragged into USAmerican culture (Tommy [the protagonist of the poem, at least] is not immune to Burger).
Nature kisses me outside the movie theater
I can’t tell if it was a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc of politics
When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc the clarity of desire terrifies me like a stage
comfort only leads to predation, and anything marvelous
becomes holy in the Google translate of humanityI prefer to keep it very doggy style
Pico’s style is conversational, in the sense of a text conversation or a social media post, marked by colloquial abbreviations: “then like clockwork u txt two days later sayin, greetings fro the Pines—you free Tuesday night?” the result is an engaging, personable affect for the speaker — Pico does a particularly expert job, I think, of balancing the colloquial affect of the poem with the more formal or “academic” subject matter and diction that he brings in at times (one of the poems does use the word “reify”). the other obvious point of comparison here, I think, is Billy-Ray Belcourt, but much though I love This Wound Is a World I think Pico does a better job keeping the speaker approachable.
I’m tired of astrology and bffs
saying Find the spring
bc spring is an asshole, getting yr hopes n temps up then pluging like self-esteem. Plus it’s nearly half-terrifying to show again the sea of my bodyand 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.
the result is something both funny, sweet, angry, and poignant, a sharp reminder of the genocidal violence that underwrites the United States and a just as sharp statement of, if not Indigenous joy, then a kind of Indigenous anxious almost-satisfaction, however fleeting or partial, in spite of and in the face of genocide.
moods: dark, emotional, funny, horny, inspiring, reflective