Lovely people keep asking me what this poem “Refuse” is “about,” a demanding kind of question I struggle to answer completely whenever I’m called to contextualize my own poetry. My answer is, when I write poetry, it is because some inner lens has focused, and a mood comes over me (a mood nearly grammatical in its totality, a paradigm shift, like that of the subjunctive tense) and in that mood I draw near the unknowable feeling, the center of the flame, using language. This is my philosophical approach to poetry. It’s also an approach that owes itself to Paul Éluard’s La terre est bleue.

I’ve taken to saying that writing poems is like playing a game with words. After an encounter with Antonio Machado’s true poem En el entierro de un amigo I’ve been thinking about how translating poems is a game too: new meanings appear. The opening line of the poem is Tierra le dieron una tarde horrible / They gave him Earth one horrible afternoon. There is just enough absurdity in that phrasing: They did not give him to the Earth, like abdicated property: they gave him the element of Earth, like a gift. Simple phrasing fitting for most horrible of afternoons. My literal English ear is even tempted to say it as, “Earth they gave him one horrible afternoon.” But, the entire encounter sparked in me some somnambulistic curiosity, and I wanted to see what shifted in my own poem if translated it.

So in honor of my friends who are formidable translators, I did my own clumsy rendition of “Refuse / El Desecho.”

Llora para que el agua sea un hecho de palabras 
El hielo en las alas de la abeja 

En mí cuerpo influyen árboles abuelitas
Rareza teje una bufanda 

Había gatitos con un soplo de curry 
Colgaban a los narices de un gancho en la gravedad 

Los ojos que son perdidos rehusaba la tema 
El sol se hundía el patio de juegos

Cheers, yall

This is a revised edition of a short story that appeared on this blog about nine months ago under the title “Jesus Houdini Bec.” Thanks to Griffin Blue for reading, your pronunciation of “lesions” is very enjoyable.

Man, woman, scythe, book: this story is for the people of Treehouse, yall inspire me.

This entire story came to me almost verbatim in a dream. But it took about two weeks to coalesce into coherence, that is, to write it down.

My goal was to do more worldbuilding. Which one of the difficulties is: if you start a lot of threads, how can you resolve all of them neatly- or should you? When so many relationships in life remain unfinished, still in tension. And one cannot know all things or even most things. So I’m working to strike a balance between enticing mystery and plain confusion.

My secondary goal was to actualize “the science of fiction,” a term that Nnedi Okorafor coined in her baller cyborg novel Noor. If fiction is the science of designing worlds parallel to our own, what then is an anarchist utopia? Not just fun to imagine: not just fun to read: but healing. The opening of a door.

As for other influences; I’m reading The Dispossessed and also, for some fucking reason I’m rereading C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and that’s real fun. And I continue to think about Murakami a lot while steadfastedly not reading 1Q84, and N.K. Jemesin’s The Fifth Season in this season of wet cold.

This a draft. Subject to change. Enjoy, yall 🙂