Images TK
or
“An acknowledgment that it is impossible to move forward”
I had been dreaming in subtitles
Maybe I was watching a film when I wrote this
Or dreaming I was watching a film when I wrote this
Who wrote this, I asked myself, watching the cult film
And fiddling with my phone, watching the moon
Through another familiar frame, luminous unsuppressed screen
Orchestrated to induce identification with one’s “surroundings” while holding
The line between culture and nature, between interior and, anyway, moon
Revealed by the Orthodox fathers at the crest of the hill
Its hallucinated orb or porcelain report reaching a kind of apogee
Glacial then floral in its fullness, almost bordello
As my friend might put it, her blast of hair mouthing some blue
Soundtrack through another poorly fit translucent casement
Many pale apartment blocks and neo-feudal economies away
Between us only the soft and viral confluence of airs, skies both solar and lunar
Constellating our glittery mineral stasis, our looseness of ties to a rocky world
Indexing past arrivals and present planetary returns
In strange animal signatures to which poets to the west affixed weekly readings
I wondered what their sky—once ink, now glitch—revealed that ours did not
Indeed the Eastern Mediterranean sky that came down
This very night like some wet dark denim
Maybe Japanese, maybe American, hard and expensive
While inside my apartment, reports woven of goat hair
In a language of some incised relief most inscrutable
Crossed moving images laden with a more fluent and flunky darkness
Poverties at once emotional and economic and light source
Almost genre, that kind of scripted violence
All sought my vision to which I could not affix captions
Could not ascribe borders closed open or otherwise
Beyond litanies of feeling or recrimination sans syntax, that is
So I wrote down (I write everything twice) a letter or index
Of something close to facts but not, really, in any instance:
A group of women at the door…
Architecture
It smells like rain and icons…
Debt
Where were you, she called…
Teargas
I wasn’t sure but I’m pretty sure…
Values
All those uncertain years, I…
Speculation
You should get to work…
Period Romance
The wall like a flesh wound…
Psychoanalysis
Pledge to hire five thousand new cops…
Austerity
Mouth in the shape of a mouth…
Assimilation
Plural then singular, light on footnotes…
Water Borders
Constant elections of death cults…
Land Borders
I’m getting in touch to ask if you might…
Poverty
He’s not been well, we thought you…
Nationalism
No language, no child, no country…
Whiteness
By the freeway, near the fields…
Inheritance
I saw this performance last night…
Autoethnography
He asked about ancestors and insects…
Poetics
The light is criminal, he hands her mail…
Ecology
It’s a ruin not an earthquake…
Migratory Patterns
What brought you here, the temples…
State Violence
You’re being pretty dramatic…
Narrative
She rode horses growing up, didn’t she…
Heterosexuality
You didn’t show, I didn’t think…
Expropriation
His rhetoric or her border control…
Skepticism
The prisons privatized of course…
Anthropology
Don’t say that, after everything I…
Deep Listening
Built for profit or disrepair not life…
Ambition
What was it like to grow up there…
Shame
She didn’t die there but years before…
Colonialism
Didn’t go to the party for the new regime…
International Cooperation
They tried to get in, she said, but…
Criticism
The trees smell like semen, don’t they…
Art Institutions
Research gleaned for policy…
Sustainable Agriculture
They resigned but retained their shares…
Confessional Literature
The runner backlit, the port empty…
Strategic Minerals
The global grind of, what, criminality…
Boredom
I can meet you but just in case…
Unaccompanied Minors
I wasn’t sure you’d want to…
Astrology
[Silence]
Feminism
The wall was “like” a flesh wound…
Language
The cops were riding double and…
Minimalism
She showed us her bandaged knees…
Capital Controls
[Silence]
Sex
It wasn’t as counterintuitive as it seems…
Laughter
[Laughter]
Class Consciousness
The desert was beginning and end…
Silence
I examined my little script, neither ecstatic litany nor sober shopping list
Its uncertain cinematic vernacular
Lifted from the classical narrative modes in which I had been educated
Parables and poetics of the sitcom-strewn child out west, paracinematic
It told no story but what poem in a period film does
My preposition being that
I don’t believe in progress but I want it
Which I whispered to myself like any despondent and desirous spectator
Confronted with her many pallid screens and monitors
Wishing self-obliteration in the immersive experience
Of light and language-stricken bodies arranged as dusky interiors
For waged labors and amber embitterments, not metaphors but illustrations of interiority
Like the letter as a “recognizable narrative motif in the mise-en-scène
Of the period film”—what I mean to write is that this is a report
On the present and what feeds it, a letter as performative figure
“that carries an utterance through time or space”
Yet I couldn’t decide in which column or language to place
Those I loved who were mostly dead or had left
Whose names I knew by heart and circumstance
Who offered me life then exile and a body
For whose missing bodies I decried the inherited system, their postures
Shoulders syntax stain of throat sweet notes certain singular and seismic motions
I noted in my accounts as among my deepest privations
Anyway, if our ancestors are continually performing among us
As the Haitian painter theorized live online in our conversation last week
Like revolutionary letters, I thought briefly, then forced myself to refocus
Maybe I could catch a glimpse, catch a moment
Of their time, I thought, my heart in my mouth
Or my hand, as it were, organ as offering, maybe they’d return
I could feel my therapist sigh like an ancestor maybe would
Indiscreetly, all the world past and present on narrow, experienced shoulders
Swept over with a thin sweater, for there was no heating, the tenants couldn’t afford it
So I turned back to another set of windows
Where I found again and would like to report that
My inbox could be divided into two types of taking the wrong tone:
The progressive party emails from my first country:
This is Bad, Quinn or Quinn, Can You Believe It?!
I could actually
And the gallery emails of forced capitalist cheer
From my moneyed country following:
You’re Invited to a Zoom Champagne Brunch!
No invitation ever seemed so honest
It seems important to state here that
No emails of this kind came from my current country
In which I was only partly and precariously established
By which I mean I was the renter of an apartment
In an economy that was granular and shattered, and to whose many
Political parties I had no affiliation or subscription
Except for casual spaces run by mercenary artists who once in a blue
Moon sent missives on capital and care across our servers
Radical in their incoherence, their strange systems of
Capitalization and font-switching and self-importance
It was always the most shameless and vested in power who waxed
On about healing and vulnerability, I thought
And assholes who talked about fonts
Still it was true—the moon laboring blindly in liquid assent, I assure you—that
The new party in power had been going after the most vulnerable
In a made-for-TV way since their quick and necropolitical election
The local conservative media supported their endeavors enthusiastically
Filming them pulling displaced families out of squats
In the early morning hours, birds cooing from wet rooftops
The giant agaves quiet and inscrutable in lean shadow
On the hill, pulling moisture from air of petrol and Bergamot
That humid morning for example, as a collection of buses idled
Dispensing discreet clouds of exhaust like the cumulous punctuations of historical paintings
In the street of the squat, near the church parking lot, children wailed
Their exhausted parents stood in distress and full knowledge
The police in full medical gear to infer disease
The police in full riot gear to infer criminality
I have already written this once, no, twice
Was this a mediated exercise in the political imaginary
Of the exclusionary logic of the nation-state and its moving imagery
Or simply early morning in the early days of new far-right governance
The subsoil and subtext of liberal corporate-military ascendency
This the world since the sixteenth century and 5000 BC
Birds were burning with song on the hill like small brushfires
Shadowy trees of winter were chandeliers of bitter orange
As I sat in my rented interior, soothing myself with a litany most familial and sadistic
The families were loaded onto waiting buses
In front of the assembled cameras—and again I wondered about the cruelty
That the new government inferred of the general populace by this
How many times can I ask and narrate this
Was the local TV audience’s taste for brutality already extent or did they coax it
Into being like birdsong licking blue agave into flame
Like new opioids “flooding” the market for pharmaceutical heirs, mass death
For the grandchildren’s inheritance, or like the fast fashions of previous
Seasons, their once unknown but now necessary narcotic
For those too indebted to consider other forms of consumption and commerce
What, in other words, do we consume and what do we actually want
It remains though that in the street of the squat
The police were pulling at the thin shawls of mothers and sisters
Bright acrylic or lucid cotton, each flammable in their own way
Children pulling at their parents’ legs, crying wildly or sniffling softly
Tears their mothers would put out like small fires
As the buses pulled away
Then a note-taking journalist from the left in attendance
Was assaulted by the police for good measure, and that afternoon
Op-eds were written by sanguine college graduates from good local families
Claiming a renewed sense of Law & Order was good
For their country good for the economy good for national
Character good for property rights and those good properties’ absentee owners
So good, good, good, they lyricized the selfhood of abandoned buildings, mineral and moral
Of character, a magnanimous, vacuous language they gleaned
From the canon of capital, the dulcet altruistic tones
From their good colonial fathers, editors, despots
Language as ouroboros, I thought, absolving itself by eating itself
In between their sentences bodies tended to each other for death would arrive in the endnotes
The moon was still visible, lightly chalked to the wet blue sky
A beached eye whose focus was uncertain
Its evensong narcotic starting to level off
As police bricked up the building’s entrance
No shelter no shelter no shelter, no mercy either
Was the lingering liturgical text not the subtext there was no subtext can’t you read or sing
The church just across the street was brown, Byzantine, and quiet
Bitter oranges pilled the neoclassical grounds of the French Institute next door
Where locals took language classes and/or drugs
Thick garden walls covered with new and old lashings of graffiti, bird shit, and moss
The oily air smelled of herbs, citrus, exhaust, exhaustion, and authoritarianism
I might have already mentioned this
It smelled of violence—its logic renewed by the good families
Every generation for their greater, what, good and goods
For the greater, what, good, who really thought
The air was cool, it was still winter, the climate was still a disaster
During drinks later, as I recounted the morning, a guy said that they might be terrorists
Or diseased who knew didn’t they brutalize their women
Stoning them etc., to death, he added, looking at me, smiling, anxious, back straight
I told him he was mixing up countries, those who stoned women were our allies
And rich, they didn’t flee war on boats, they bombed instead
Don’t you get tired of using women as excuses for your violence I said
Far away from my perhaps unfair words even as I said this
He raised his eyebrows at me, only foreign feminist he knew
His very young wife sat quiet and bored beside him
Disassociating, as always, or so I always thought
Inside I felt familiar sorrow and outside I used familiar words
They darted around like birds, drinking in air rubbed with citrus and alcohol
We drank our drinks and some months later the pandemic it arrived
It arrived by air—in the bodies of the good sons and daughters
Of the good families who traveled goodly for education commerce government entertainment
It arrived by sea—in the bodies directing the good ships of goods
It arrived by word of mouth by wet pine by shipping container by yellow subtitle
By good it arrived (we had thought it might but still, good godly surprise)
Perhaps it arrived by me, for I had recently and often traveled
Anyway, I might note here that the new government quickly ceased
Their early morning ablutions of disappearances
Calling off their police as they might call off dogs, I thought, ungraciously
Stopped their nightly broadcasts of state violence and fake disease
For real disease it had arrived and so the state made a quick edit
From real violence upon the vulnerable to real concern for their citizens
Who were also vulnerable
Let that word stretch like gum across your tongue
Touching your mouth’s dry desert ceiling, its wet valley, guilty only of flood, its vault
Of viral air, watch it stretch across the mouth of the deserted urban screen
Slowed down like a film, frame, frame, frame
The displaced families who had been disappeared on buses
To camps outside the city—they were now locked in too
By the new government who pointed to new disease, such their luck
It now existed, though not, as it were, in the camps, not yet
In the city center a strange quiet descended, birdcall became extra lucid
My apartment became extra lucid, rote litany of days of uneasy, inexpert stasis
We were locked in too but we knew it was different in every way
The moon it waxed and waned, very vulnerable and repetitive
Exposed in the dark denim of air like a photograph
Like families in street or field exposed to the elements
Spring storms brought Sahara from the south, some surface of copper grit
For the terrace, red as a mouth, while bodies brought pandemic from the north
Short films of uncirculated images because these were not
The bodies meant to signify disease, we all knew this
I have been dreaming in subtitles
I might have mentioned this
Months passed we stayed in you know all this
Now the city is slowly opening but not the camps
What body is stateless? Goes the rhetoric of my emails
Each given a frame like a mouth, glowing like a fever with a question
But it remains that this is a real query, a true letter
In my dreams I stand at a desk piled high with papers
Petitioning for life—May I walk, may I read, may I work, may I sleep
May I dream, may I fuck, may I feed, may I love, may I have a family, may I be—
First: yes, yes, then no, denying each and everything
In my dreams such petitions are badly timed to the mouths moving in scenes
I cannot follow, the narratives of sea or land or emotional passage absurd or brutal and unending
And so I descend and exit this dream as I would a pale building
I walk up the hill past the ancient immortal agaves to the smaller church
Careful to breathe no bodies, cross no shadows, eat no bitter fruit
My eyes search the air for birds for temples for sea for him for her for language for danger
For some accurate index of this life, inexpert, sage-strewn, and cloudless
For vines of jasmine, sweet and burning, and balconies and highways of toxic oleander
If the government has ended their daily filmed briefings
With the sympathetic state epidemiologist, his crooked tie and worn brow did
Capture our hearts, did capture something of our emptied minds
But the scenario will be recast and rewritten, the regime and its police
Will begin calling the media again, the newspaper editor recovered from the virus
Healthy and determined they will restart production
Of moving images of a state violence so familiar they look like reruns
For a local viewership pale from interiors and sickness and sometimes hunger
There are no subtitles there are no subtitles there are no subtitles
Though the line to the food pantry is lean and grey and long as a sentence
Narrating the city like the ancient overbuilt river does in voiceover
There are camps on the mainland and camps on the islands
Camps of the water (we call them boats) and camps of the terra
Vul—, say the word vulnerable with your mouth full of water
Write it in your poem in your press release delete the word care
Meanwhile your inbox is full again, like water not paper
The great exhibitions have been delayed by one to two years
“An acknowledgment that it is impossible to move forward”
My inbox is full of this, missives in the language of delay
I wonder if I should also acknowledge this
Among the various errors that have created my current status
Perhaps I should also send out a press release, parroting such pale and pressed language
To my one surviving parent, my estranged husband
To the purveyors of my complicated immigrant status
To my employers and editors in various countries and geopolitical directions
To my friends of various regions to whom I fling my love and my sorrows
“An acknowledgment that it is impossible to move forward”
And yet I do, as through a poem or its film
With their undeveloped languages, badly timed and moonstruck
As through a city that films its deportations of people attempting to stay alive
Then offers the images to their citizens in place of sustenance
The subtitles not quite accurate though they fit the frame
I asked my therapist yesterday if the state could have coaxed into being
The pandemic by their fake suggestion of disease
Among those families and lonely figures seeking refuge from violence
The masks and plastic gloves in which they handled their bodies
Pushing them onto buses and out of the cities for the cameras
Setting the stage for the ubiquity of such images many months later
Framed by a narrow, historical window she looks at me quietly
She is quite lovely I have often noted this
She says Quinn our minds are not that powerful
She says that this is more of my magical thinking
But I remain, as ever, doubtful
It has been written that one should name the location
Where one came to voice, to name that space of suffering and theorizing
I’d like to name the birdsong that came to voice
In place of my voice and many others
In the footnotes and endnotes and rooftops of this singular and plural period
In this era of images scented with bitter orange, petrol, inherited violence, and collapse
Both societal and ecological, for nature only exists
If you consider yourself outside of it
Elders tell us, blue words oiled by deep extractions and night-blooming jasmine
International cooperation and bodies of water marked for death and tourism
I felt the atmosphere turn, I felt the apartment turn, but it was only another season
An earthquake troubling the ancient seabed
The moon poured itself out
And slipped by
And so did I
In this fair city of airs and airs and airs and airs
Each to be found here and elsewhere