The Poetry Project

For your description2

Tess Brown-Lavoie

When I come back to a place I’ve been before but not for awhile

like California, all the times I was here come up the drain:

all contexts, ex girlfriends, and bad behavior, an aura of lag and also

sun, wind, two 20 minute naps in a day, even the girl I used to be

in timeless disconnection from who arrives now— is all stapled in

this plastic ecothrift grab bag— 15 unrelated notecards and envelopes

which I’ll scatter amongst my mother, friends, lover, and benefactor—

And all the short-term and distant memories related to places (Pacific coast

Rhode Island, suburban high school with melodic sprinklers hitting the steel

grate of the fence) and times (spring, magic hour, the moony night)

these people and our relation (their names)— all collect like parts of an echo

(original utterance, negative space, walls ground and ceiling, sound changing

and layering over time) and the evening feels both very singular and fleeting

and also infinitely referential like all the covers of a really good song

Again the day stares down a pink rose nestled in a white primrose bush

I described the flowers at breakfast already and wrote about them

in a postcard, then dispossessed myself of the postcard, so here I am

recording it a third time for myself. To send the letter I walked down

a busy road not built for pedestrians, as in many towns in the west

took photos of sculptural aboveground pipes and the Women’s Club

then returned to the seat near the roses where repetition makes

a song of my life. Wind in California reminds the homies of threats

of fire despite recent rain and a gutting loyal blue afternoon sky

wind reminds my Boston ass of being cold in winter

Obviously now we must and are assessing the integrity

of different forms of treating pain and other symptoms

of empire in light of the desperation of its crumbling facades

the universities are revealed to be financial instruments

and we mean to hold the suffering of the world, folds of

which we have some practice finding pleasure or poetry

inside of, looking for protections in the recurrence

of spring and even in the humility of words

I find it difficult to locate myself in absence of my objects of

conditional love, though I swear I’m trying so hard to know

god is in even the most difficult people and even in the vivid

brutality of global violence and violence of my conditional love

and in the distance that enables this incessant description

A poet says it is good to describe something. Fine

I agree, despite avoiding designations such as this

in chronic insistence on perverseness of these terms

It is good to describe something, to confirm conditions of

being here specifically, life’s private index, physically holding

attachment to linear time in a deepening ravine between my eyebrows

and in the fading blossom that started to bud my first day in Vallejo

a skinny orange cat in dappled light walks close to the window

the bedroom is foggy every morning— the sun records distance

from the past detailed in notes I double back to from the weeks before

I displaced myself from those other situations: a crush of content

over three long spring pages where I wrote out the student journalists’

descriptions as they were pushed to the edge of campus

by a paramilitary force flooding the quad the story flooding

a single earbud toward the back of the general meeting—

a contained and private sound against the public sounds of the room

bifurcating two places at once, or separating my consciousness

under two reality regimes in adjacent boroughs

the space surrounding my body and its distance

from the sound of the scene described in fragments in pen

in my notebook held out to a third person beside me

now all press being escorted off campus

nobody witnessing what’s omg sledgehammers

throwing students the human barricade is still there

police contraption on 116th and amsterdam

locking the gates around reporters no exit

all the spectators outside dispersed

police entered hamilton hall

These are old friends I’ve been bad news with before

the most recent episode is late night courthouse romance

waiting out the paperless underground at central booking

where night stops according to the ruthless clock and morning

is climate controlled and fluorescent. I try to call you up from

the basement like I had that power, pulling my favorite character

into a lucid dream, sleep like a train ride only brings more speed

and careless description

It’s hard to sleep or know time from underground

double sounding double body of my twinning

which we learned to survive inside, in triangular relation

to each other and the first challenges of life—

this geometry extends the physical bunker around my sister

to house my mind and splits open two-toned nights, two of them

start with a subway ride with you, our first dawn in a way

followed by two days downtown, atmospheric cigarette

watching teenagers get out of jail for the first time or sleep

with a cardboard box for a pillow on the pavement

subdued waiting for their friends, hollering every time a kid

with purple temples and chins scraped from the dragging and

stomping of them by adults was escorted back to the scene

And when will you let me spend a regular night in your bed

you send some lines or memory of Faulkner and say

you only found this passage because I wasn’t there to distract you

in exemplary assimilation of the echo framework I now regret sharing

for how astutely I understand you will use it toward distance

Silence and the sweetness, and the alternating pain, of silence

there is an eternal flame of sorts here in the tunnel, a cord

connects all tunnels worldwide and their purpose over time

Rage in the city is passed down between fast generations

dying and living up close to one another, fucking and

being disappointed, peeling off, taking the opportunity

of getting out of jail to taste a freedom differential like coming in

from a cold night to a warm apartment, or diving from a hot day into the sea

I am seeing her

see the sun and take liberties

calling anybody she wants on the telephone

breathing air, praying on clean ground, each bruise

and burn is photographed for future cases, she drinks

three gatorades to the face retroactively, my attention

stands close enough to see water come back to her face

in tending, holding my hand in the bright hot prelude

to summer, walking to pick up a large backpack full

of spiritual supplies and herbal medicine contained

in an industrial trash bag at the fifth precinct ... oh

my echo ... how could I not be describing you

Our capacity for love is changing

this informs the tactics and strategy

and the tensions between alternate rationale

for catastrophe mobilized in every language

meetings and motivations are sutured together with conditional

love as desire for freedom abuts desire for ordinary entanglement

relieving loneliness, referring back to a photograph of a hand

loosening a screw to change the bike tire that popped on a curb

in the park after we whipped the vote and before we addressed

subtle infighting about how hard to celebrate. I’m glad some people

felt scared of us for once, that regular life is threatened

as it should be, I love our enemy I just know I’m right

about justice here and obviously I’m a terrible politician

alienating middle of the road voters

anyway we made our presence known

Adjacent pages show how I’ve been living, sound of days

reverberates hard fast and dense: violence is a tactic

not a strategy, my love poem rubs against notes

from Mohamed Abdou’s talk and personal notes from

whatever we will call the nascent thing emerging with

forms of insurgence remaining blessedly nameless

careful practice of not having a direct channel between mine

and my doubles’s heart underground, knowing our communication

was and is wired to the earliest fires of our most real and wretched longing

knowing the arc of justice wants to spank history now which is to say

light bends toward the edge of the world where ugliness is our treasure

the autodidacts can boss up, I would love health insurance

but will settle for having doctor friends

Sorry to be literal but I’ve been dreaming

and praying so long on our chance for extreme

non-continuation, mixing that could break open

this discipline to favor risk, the dark, our methods

proliferating terribly through this period of destructions

describing how a thing is perversely, such as my man

the pink rose who did lose his humble perfection

admirably knowing when to die

In California it is different and beautiful I am received

by my friends each time regardless of what is on fire

agreeing from distance or illusory closeness through fierce looking

and mutual description still echoing speech and exalted nonspeech

speculating against assimilations that have been encouraged

and expected of us, building on cacophonies, each possibility

involves some horrible rupture and unimaginable loss but

nobody shy away from true love anymore let’s promise

#278 – Fall 2024

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