It’s hard not to be Gia, a self primed for astringency or sweetness.
No, Gia’s not the locus of production—she is that aforementioned sweetness.
***
Gia Gonzales is a poisoner based in New York City, where she was born. But I think she is just a girl in a fallacy of good fortune.
Who was she? The muff eater—and her camel coat and her caramel skin. And her raven-black hair and superfluous ring.
I saw Gia belligerent with drink, and I pitied her. The bra top she spins around her pointer finger is our race and our gender. She was, at her best, a talent of reciprocity—and syntax was her corsage.
My name is Gia. But Gia is a kind of misnomer. Gia Gonzales is an experiment in form which took the shape of a Filipina aged twenty-seven years old. She was just a girl who wrote, “It’s hard not to be Gia, a self primed for astringency or sweetness. . . . ”
***
Having appropriated my manner, Gia is a squatter in my day. My first exercise would be writing “my” as “her”: I practiced “her” poem.
The pronoun made Gia mechanical, her innuendo standard, a mangy ambivalence. She had only the appearance of dalliance. Writing as life characterized as repartee. She could have been that beauty of the passive voice.
***
My brain was a crevasse and I wanted Gia to fill it. But Gia was never entering someone like me. If I could slip off her shoe and fling it desperately toward that unknowable horizon constituting the location of Gia at the end of this book. I approach her corpus, her visage dissolves into a topic of personal interest.
***
The writing was becoming harder, more difficult and more arduous because I’d begun to create too much distance from it, same letters recurring. Yet in the reencounter I was excited by it again.
Gia, your promises unite us together on this page. I’m following your stanzas good-humoredly, complaining naught. You watched, unsure, the pained and pleasurable response, like eating a chili. Writing this poem was like the simile about pulling teeth.
***
My scribe, refuse parody of Gia’s old voice, rehearsal. Memory promises a reserve of something fearful left in me, images gossiping across frame of mind, bits of tsismis tied through the family on decorative strings, a tita in large furs. Familial stories involve an erosion of history in the retelling. Here comes that dark “she” again, her lucky body a duplicity little known.
***
Gia gave way to that lilting supposing, which reconstituted Gia, dried-mushroom style, as our path forward through this writing.
I want to be like Gia, merely the anticipatory pause like an orchestra tuning before the overture of our own identification. What Gia was, was the face between the part in her curtained hair, an occupation of space exactly her height and width and temperament, despite the bold convincing otherwise.
***
Varietals of cereal giddy Gia through one long blur of present moment stretching into now. And so on this day do I pledge to be her, Gia, a pattern of patterns like a box of Triscuits.
Belief in oneself is that delusion enabling the continuation of oneself, it’s so etcetera. And so a feeling of disregard overtook me the way a wafting scent of tulips, roses, might.