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I discern, distinguish, enumerate decades between lyrics can gleam everything I ignore worry needlessly about what I would take if I had to go all the objects I care about and paid for rendered null and moot in a shift, a flick, a blink This sweet soul of mine stinks a little under scar tissue the era always one of backlash I can’t describe it with this scratchy finished pen I swear they make them with less ink these days but won’t concede I’m a paranoid curmudgeon Just because I never saw Soylent Green doesn’t mean I can’t put it in a poem or doesn’t mean I don’t know the history of my doughy skin ancient parts of the globe peasants suffering for centuries pulling tubers from the earth As 2021 draws to a close here I am rich and full with anticipation of all the content I can’t wait to consume I’ll tell you about it on the other side of my cluttered email after I dust and boil eggs and change the mattress topper For a long time it seemed my nose was always running Was it years? months? And then somehow, I realize now it stopped some time ago, I don’t know when I hear the sirens of ghost traffic The pandemic echoes an ugly, crass, utilitarian word I’d like to find someone behind rows of chairs and munch licorice and drink blueberry Mash which I’ve said before It seems we’ve been talking about looking back on this time for years and years like we’re trapped in Westworld compressed looped scenes over and over and again asking is this now?

On the last day of the year I did laundry and Betty White died. I found my psychedelic childhood sheets on eBay and the small, similar valise. My corner of the metropolis was tinsel-lit. My spirit had a liverish glow. I was alienated from real world conditions but not in a bad way. I wanted health but didn’t have the discipline to achieve it. What I tended to do was scan my surroundings and would change something if something pricked. Our attempts at risk calculation are a delusion, I thought, drowsy in Omicron’s cacophony and the book I was reading required small, pleasurable sips. Its cerebral imaginary elevated my consciousness for a little bit. I also read about “body envelope violations” and thought I saw real anguish concealed in an animal print. The animals are strapped to machines, I knew, across the country and a week later would learn, from Stephen Colbert, more of this horror: virtual reality goggles on caged milk cows to make them happier believing they are on grass and under sky, their Matrix. But then my day was a series of trivial dilemmas such as questions about when and if a next coffee and I napped in a list of Holzer truisms I never bothered to read. I was here and not here when the year ended, the one during which Texas froze and people died in Washington State’s extreme heat and we abandoned a nation leaving millions to face certain famine, the year like so many years my screens screamed and screamed and they even announced a sequel to Scream. That day I thought about the separation of what matters from matter, improved my life with a new shoe rack, organizer cart and hamper. On the last day of the year I ordered meatball sliders and watched Andy Cohen get drunk, and toast, of course, to Betty White.

Pigeons are the noise of sinuses Beings, both real and imagined, android or raw, Find consciousness through suffering And obviously vice a versa This is why “true art” is not to be found In the dustbins and leftovers of burlesque or civic parades No matter how frighteningly warm it gets this or any February One day I heard about a torso found in a shopping cart And the startling realism of contemporary animation Laying back down in bed I ask myself How can there be causation without representation? And think that every one of us is our own kind of Pangea Although I can’t explain what that means Why does my own congestion feel like the mere performance of anti-fascism? Why is the criminology of android drama so hard to decipher? Meanwhile a sink burps and gurgles from its complex ominous depths A coda to the ends of autoethnography Reminding me that no one at work can laugh that real good hearty laugh I dream I survived an electric blue zombie herd Wake so disoriented I forget the geography of daily ablutions Forget that once I hoped to find a treatise on who exactly is at risk And what we can do to attend this risk I discovered too much too late in life Never ate the perfect fried pickle Did not watch that really important show The one where character is finally disclosed And catastrophe averted in spite of the profit stream Never have I ever touched the precarious transmitter Reached in and torn it down

I stopped worrying long ago about seduction theory and post-war simulations, breakthrough expressionisms. Years bifurcate into fixed semesters, solemn as statues and a premonition of sleet, bare trees, the nuances of taupe, a world where currents charge the neighborhoods with the red simplicity of excess, bloated pathologies in hearts whose solitude smells like neon signs. Entertainment is a repugnant habit, the graphic abuse of televised dystopic fantasies in poems about binge-y obsessions and banana nut bread, where nail polish is an identity, yellow polka dots a chaotic state of grace, my leisure just a sonnet suspended in a barcode where the disembodied collide, packaged in a post-moral cloud, and 700 years of punishment fits on 21 PowerPoint slides. “It is far too easy to delete each other,” I scribble on the paper bag that holds my mask. Deluged with near calamities I Google Maps for higher ground. I find no comfort here, but I find comfort here.

So I can’t say fuck off to someone I can’t tolerate This is the head space so far up where we talk About abundant marigolds heavy as a school marm Pretending one has a full-time job is a bickering business There might be an exterminator, a plumber, an electrician In this iteration of the mode of production Also, I said we had a bee in our bonnet about ten times fast The intellectual and the anti-intellectual sitting in a tree Passing skittles on a doily like a non-ethereal Windex streak Full of sass and spice, I am nothing more than a fly-swatter In a cell-phone game trying to tell you repeatedly About the rat-tat-tat of the pile of leaves and cicada skins The odd and crazy aged hands in the corner of my cornea And the winter melon ‘capades-ness pumping Into the right-here-ness of my honest to God heart I’m too sad to finalize my lemonade stand It’s my TV show that I’m so afraid of right now No surprises here in the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft Or the Devil in literature from Milton to The Exorcist I forgot how bad I needed the reckless century Maybe I bucked convention in my mid-layer fleece Or more likely I bageled into the language disposal Whispering fuck off down the stairs into a bit of world Careening right into my list of words Wondering why no one gets drunk anymore

for whatever reason a fraction of a fraction of a second a hover moment, a Ouija thingy I think of elephants why not?

once I rode the subway and there was a panic a woman hit the deck and I was embarrassed by life I walked with the frantic crowd too cool for school no idea what was happening

how to stop being the worst person when your nose itches, I wonder as the pandemic billows around us an unending sheet

later I find a pulse between my Vogue and The Clarion I fathom and I fart and I know I am alive this is the life! my ancient name curls around my finger I draw lullabies in the margins of my rooms in the future I’ll scout lunch tables for my kindred few

when words don’t look like words and the letters stand alone in their strangeness the goddess said make strange, make strange reach for culture to make sense of the day believe earnestly in an idea mixed in the mosh a silver hair on a linen shirt a pellet bead white amid the pink seeds this flat ass so humble on its route to the shower

Diana Rickard is a poet and sociologist, and an Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her poems have recently appeared in a number of journals and magazines, and her book on documentaries about wrongful conviction is forthcoming from New York University Press.

Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

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Find the RAIL in print

A message from Phong Bui Publisher and Artistic Director

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