Forthcoming in Vestiges_07: Catachresis
One with more than one
Driving across state lines. Coffee
with sugar. Sacrifice as wage
of institutional laxity. Filling up
on confessions of women cut into
to get at cancers. A received name
nicked into a single syllable. Friday
colloquium. Remedial polyamory.
A house or someone else’s storage
space. Formula poem form plus
identity keyword. Anyone’s
autobiography. The sound
of a K-Tel soft-rock cassette:
a powder-blue Datsun dropping
the kid off at some Bauhaus-designed
primary school. Diagonal line
of cocked hip and pointing finger
atop an electronic grid of Simon!
primary colors. Slip satin
sheepskin sliding
into a punctum of corkscrew
curls and roast skin. Then the language
of the dripping sink.
A blurb for we are all we have not just our care and theories what we’ve read poignant details eliciting attention meaning and insight and sensory signals or our geopolitics the lands and bodies incur inter spread across continually die for the commons horizons maneuvers campaigns direct actions disjointed to lead to something “return to a place of injury” at least one of us likes an opening to land at the end passivity to vibration as a mode of criticism attention paid to the body as container and processing filter transforming input signals a listening child who isn’t taught to address certain elders speak still memory does not stabilize the present but enters fictions of the past and beyond I rewatched scenes on loops even once from the start I sincerely doubted I would ever finish I didn’t think I’d abandon it either I finally got to the moment when the lead actor reflected in real time an event that interrupted the film her co-star had just gotten reabsorbed by the carceral entity the film process was so long it absorbed a person into the making of the film and this person during the making of the film was going through the cycle of incarceration-release-reincarceration a cycle politicizing the non-professional actors and filmmaker’s community at that point I paused the film happens in the present reacts to the present part of daily life for days it’s never taken me a week to watch a movie a scene or two a day life has gotten so busy and the sense of time in this film lulls me into a state of no longer following plot still wanting to follow plot scenes on loops just stuck on loops until the moment when the lead commented on a significant event so I stopped.
Are these terms referential theoretical ideological engaged in translation across languages and territories retrospective anticipatory stable suggestive of an afterlife of historical periods descriptors of time about encounters at what levels of what nature to approach and represent an entity as a palimpsest of influences like sitting in the sunny backyard together as liminal precarious people the strangeness of hanging out is already a lot of social life for objects road-tripping to Niedecker’s grave with a snake the snake blurting out I love you in the Ft Atkinson library reading room dramatizing collective trauma at a conference reception event playing the part of a rival betrayed by discovering you’ve become the object of your own gossip about falling for a parody of queer postcolonial family desire like what’s the difference an historian asks where and how such an entity’s voice emerges from structural conditions an artist asserts the beauty of such voice all of us entangled project a delay in the cyclical pattern of being subjected to history just long enough to say I love you.
CHECK
lessor’s cheque ore lest
few check slurry split-offs
in vein canary predation lay
secular canary blind decor
decoy blast bottle virgule
bottle soil even slicker
oily furred serendipity
pissy foyers dew fur
fulgural regulation
per to chant porcelain
Have departed as exiles socioeconomic and climate refugees emigrants and labor migrants promise translation no one way of knowing and feeling questions context therefore meaning Titling articulation sound and body projected to those who don’t feel them rather than among those who are them cordoned off comes of death like myths of undoing that require loyalty to a written humanity overdetermined and vacated a violence and a living fact lack of gender specificity and syntactical glitches express generosity overstatement silencing in the midst of war leisure space of overwhelm who aren’t individuals break out reproducing.
—
Kimberly Alidio is the author of Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions, 2025), A Teaching Summer (Spiral Editions, 2024), Teeter (Nightboat Books, 2023; winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award), and others. Her essays have appeared in e-flux, American Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of American History, Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora, and the Poetry Foundation. She lives on the unceded territories of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.