This poem is from the forthcoming Privacy Policy: The Poetics of Surveillance (Black Ocean), edited by Andrew Ridker.
Can you read my mind
White flags pitched in the lawn like sad seeds, the flecks of blue and red blinking in the wind/ innuendo is a close word, it touches my tongue with perfect nuance and gives none away, like the tom in atom minus the uncle and blow-up and Antonioni with subtitles and a bowl a fluffy green grapes, a counter-commons, a shoulder full of suntan/or that clandestine-for-leverage answer muttered across cultures as songs or cult birds/blackbirds and Donald Byrds and to have gathered all of the memories of your own racism into a guilt that manifests as phrases like I love Motown, or, I love Detroit, or some of my best lies are black and blue, and true too, stadium acoustics like the anthem in Marvin Gaye’s parched bible fraying beside a barrel/Pride is truth’s stiffest rival after shame and blood and everything else besides subtlety and re-written creation myths. Like that time I won my own heart in a dance, something about how I could glide through the air and land in a split— made me a technology I wanted to caress and witness/forever: where the anniversary party is this quiet, candlelit, almost vigil punctuated by a crude exhilaration marked with the thrill of survival, ritual, renewal, a power stronger than itself— is love— but that’s so trite on nationalism and good grass I almost won’t admit it until it’s tragic or a some kind of risk or gasp or actually happening and impossible in the same matter-of-fact, like those invisible stars flickering as soon as you look away, tricking you into having mercy on yourself
