“Given the core question of this issue—‘What would you do with someone else’s incompletions?’—I approached the poem I received as another person, and its ‘incompletions’ as said person’s own. I could not complete someone else. I could, however, understand their hurts; I could show them the parts of me that mirrored how they felt. The first poem grew around my struggle to free myself from the visceral grip of Ann Ang’s words; it emerged as an aggressive remix/exorcism of her poem. The next few grew out of my resonances with individual lines in her poem. Each poem both names and sidesteps things in equal measure; there is always something that cannot be said, something that cannot be fully grasped or torn free of. These poems are as complete as they can be as I write this, but some of them still cling to me; there is something that still lies buried between their lines, something I am pulled back to again and again. One day, when all the mirrors unfog, I might reach out and call them finished again.”

 

 

                                                                                          ~ ~ ~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A GAZE HELD BETWEEN SPIN CYCLES OF FLAME
(read two axes. smoke my world. i will live.)

 

– i am                                                                                                        the effigy man
my world                                                                     is origami                           folded
                                                                                    from                      resinous smoke
                                    my ghosts were born                                              before me –
                                    they are                                    my proxies
                                                                                                                        carefully i will
                                                                                                                        live
                                    disposably
                                                                                                                        the width
                                                                                                                        of my coffin
is the world                  buckled into an economy class seat
my world                     i am
                                    my ghosts,                                                        the resinous proxies
                                                                                                            i live
                        the world buckled
                        me before                                    the width of              my coffin
                                                                                    smoke                          will seat
                                                                                                                        effigy
                                    they are                                                                                   
                                    disposably folded smoke          ,           width of will;

 

                                                            is origami
                                                    man ?     born carefully (?)
                                  an economy      (?)                         folded ?

the coffin ghosts my effigy

 

                                  i am an economy                      smoke of me
                                              before effigy                    i am the seat of proxies(,)
                                                          i folded (.)        my class.
                                                          i ghost my coffin carefully.
                                                          smoke my world.
                                                                        i will live.
                                                                      i will live.
                                                                              i will live. i –

 

 

 

 

LA MALEKZORCISMO DE LA KVIRA KORPO
(the anti-exorcism of the queer body)

 

I. THE HOLY GHOST
came upon me like a blanket of lead.
Two colonisations gave us thick sheets of ghosts.
They swear I will not be charged so I trail my lips
      down another man’s neck.
This islandwide silence foreshadows the sky.
That cloud on the horizon will not bring rain.
There is an inevitability to a crowd.
Bacchus was killed by the strong mobs of Jesus,
      stolen Bacchus who wined from another man’s mouth.
Look: Jesus also died because of a crowd.

 

II. I AM
swallowing their words before them the same way I did
their theodicy. I have swallowed many things that had legs
that still kicked and bulging eyes. There are things that
could have been universal, a language that they could have
known. I keep my teeth still as truth babbles in my gut like
the jumping chunks of a plague Egyptian. I am waved aside.
When I topple into the stall to vomit my frogs
there are no two men to flank my exit, no angel
to squat by my door. Well, thank fuck
       I still got a Judas.

 

III. GOD
fizzed in my insides like bacterial fission, papered over
my mouth with a thick film of cells. When I tongued free I
watched Him root in the napes of my parents, their arms
fruiting branches of hot ash and gas. I blinked and they
grinned. Wombless I rolled the cold eye of the ultrasound
over my belly, saw twenty clear foetuses budding like
grapes – this is number six and I am in the corner heaving
 , jaw smarting        , they watch the jelly tailed in umbilicus
the wet thing smiling all over    they hug it to pulp and i
       feel more gel climb up my throat like a sentence
                                            like prayer                    like love

 

 

 

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