Forthcoming in Vestiges_05: Lacunae
In Vegas, I live in a box. In a beautiful box for 4.5 months. And, it looks like this:
Where the light is miraculous.
There are radiations in my winter. My summer is skydiving.
I have been waking up in a cloud of fog. This weightlessness that is filled with liquid deterrent.
Each morning I wake up I hear the faint echo of a piano, of someone playing a piano, from the far receding center of the light. I am in Sin City and I shouldn’t expect to hear the faint sound of a piano like sonic water droplets, but I do.
Should you practice what you preach?
Not necessarily.
There is virtue in hypocrisy. It’s hard to find virtues, but I am making progress.
Ah. Lovely. Elton John has a private jet. And, he was very close to Princess Diana. Who wouldn’t be? Except Harry’s father. For environmental reasons, the Duke andDuchess made four trips in 11 days. One of those trips, courtesy of Elton John and husband, David, was for Harry and Meghan to come and visit them in their mansion in Nice to celebrate Meghan’s birthday.
Is there carbon equity if one owns a private aircraft and is not able to use it?
Are we able to label something as accumulating carbon footprint if we let (extraordinary) resources such as a private jet accumulate dust?
An exploding star places its cellphone
In his pocket
And says the following—
“I don’t want to pee out any more intergalactic/diuretic cosmic dust. I want my body to belong to
my own cosmos. But Wunderland—”
Its phone blooms out a tulip in reply
And buries its heart in a flowerpot.
Surface dictator
Surface dictator
Surface dictator
“I wish you could see the radiation beneath your eyelids.”
Meanwhile there is a piano at Elton John’s Nice villa.
Below the surface of itself
Until my dictator
And my dictation
My amanuensis starts to retaliate against my formlessness
Dr. Potassium
Dr. Potassium
Should I take you home with me? To cure my diuretic.
An exploding star is worried, “What if, what if, I pee out all of my minerals?”
Meanwhile I am lacking in electrolytes. I get dizzy when I stand up. I am seeing stars. My heart muscles are getting weak. My blood pressure is too low. Could someone smell the immigrational status of a dying star? And, it’s not true that the antidote to pain is connection. The antidote to pain is to have a piano near a riverbed. The river runs its music through the keys. And, a dying star whispers into my ears, “I am not an expert at brown nosing. So I rely on discipline and hard work to get me places in the world.” And, I think a dying star is so ambitious. Where would a dead star go if it succeeds in life.
Elton John sits on the bench of his piano and plays a song for one dying star.
“It’s music to my ears,” says the star amusingly to himself.
At Chautauqua, in the nether region of the cosmos, a very successful businessman advises me on my writing life. He is a twig, part of a branch of a tree, and he says, “Vi, monetize your imagination. Behave like you are an old white guy. And be a griffin good.”
I sit down and study the weather patterns of my soul. My body. There is climate change everywhere. My hands, feet, and nose used to feel cold. Now they are like heating pads I could place over my stomach whenever I have menstrual cramps. I used to stare coldly at the closed sign at an ice cream parlor because they wouldn’t sell ice cream in the winter months. They shut down for six months out of the year so they could play the flute to an almond tree. I want to be the dolphin that gets high on pufferfish. I am not Nietzsche, but I need, I just need, my neurotoxin. I am not an elephant seal—
Biting into a pufferfish will paralyze me. Probably not from the waist down. Probably from the tongue and up. Though emotionally—I am experiencing reverse climate change in my heart. I used to want to hug everyone, especially when I walked down the streets and it was verdant and the world was not gray and half-full with nasty pollutants. But, now my heart is swollen with hatred for humanity.
Could heart surgery remove hate?
I am still facing the danger. The aftermath. The side effects of TBI, not quite the same as FBI. Traumatic brain injury after chest trauma from open-heart surgery.
What is it like to be in a concussed state?
I see patches of light. I am hypersensitive to light. My brain hurts randomly at different times of the day. I wake up with consistent ringing in my ears. And, there are 24.9 kilos of clouds weighing down in my consciousness. I can’t seem to pin a balloon down with my memory.
Has anyone ever physically touched someone’s heart? A lover even? Certainly never a lover. My Pakistan nurse kept on saying, “I just can’t believe someone not just figuratively but literally and corporeally touched your heart.” In case you didn’t know: the heart is usually concealed inside the body. Usually lives inside the bone cage like a prisoner. In a maximum-security prison. To break this supermax calcified correctional facility or cardiovascular penal institution as some of you like to call it, a saw is needed. Preferably an electric one. After he used a saw, then he took a knife. The surgeon then had to make an incision into my heart so he could operate on the valve. And, the heart can’t be wet.And, if it’s wet, he can’t operate on it. So, my blood (about 3.5 quarts of it)had to take an Uber and then rent an Airbnb from a perfusionist who was happy to rent out a heart-and-lung machine for my body. Has my heart ever lost a belt buckle to a perfusionist before?
There are pins and needles wherever once I realized that my friend lost her decade-old belt to a guy whom she fucked and met on Tinder.
But who steals a belt?
Then I recalled my film theorist friend who lives in LA, I remember her exact words, “He was so confident about the profoundness of his good intention that he thought little things, like the details of his contract, were insignificant.” Then I remember, they were significant to me. Very significant. Now, because of him, my paycheck from teaching is delayed a week and then another week.
I don’t want to amputate hate. I want to preserve it like how fish factories preserve sardines. Just stack them high. Just stack them.
—
Vi Khi Nao is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (1913 Press, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry). She is also the author of the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of FC2’s 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) and the novel Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the current Fall 2019 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.