We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
The summer deck is filling with riotous rain pouring down from your hands,
I think. I’m terrible at these supernatural images and you wouldn’t like if I kept it up.
I know you are trying to water the plants, and the seedlings and all of everything
I might have neglected for the last three months while I’m here fucking it all up.
You let me sit in my nightgown all day while I type on the computer under heaps
of shitty books. You want me to move into something meaningful and I know you
are a function of whatever it is because you gave me all the departing desires,
as a way of teaching me to cope and to stay a poet when I don’t feel like being a poet.
Now the challenge is in how I put all this in me in the way you’ve always presented
me with possibilities, a kind of irreverence. What to do with the heart in rage. You
tend to those plants now—after I’ve killed them—and exactly in rain streaming:
a figurative blue that pools and floods damning everything but me with the uncivil
domesticity fighting to sound out all the activity no longer between us, unanswered
in time and space. I would tell you every day if I could that you are still exuberant;
meanwhile, there is still time in the day. I find that the sounds are louder now. I
don’t hear you talking to yourself in the hallways late in the evening as you used to
do. It was a robbed mumbling that echoed. Your drink, your vices, the privacy which
you spoke to a mute night. I noticed after you were gone that there was no more
aurality that started towards a finishing tension. A drone did drown in hollow floors,
in a sunburned house, in one now planted with proprietary neglect.
Contributions from readers enable us to provide a public space, free and open, for the discussion of ideas. Join this effort – become a supporting reader today.
Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, Monthly Roundup, and event notifications.
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.
MacArthur Genius Kelly Lytle Hernández makes the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission