When I still lived in the Other Country and kept
my silence as if it were a Silence of Years,
I imagined, frequently, someone like that.

She had two names instead of one. And two hands.
And three legs. And four eyes. And too much of all
the rest.

Forked, like they say sometimes about the tongue to mean
it's full of danger.

Unresolved, as they qualify novels sometimes, the ones without
happy endings.

Fluid, like the Postmodern condition or like life itself.

She smoked cigarettes in the way that I've
mentioned, and because of it, I recognized her. That grayness.
That hard ceasing. Her clothing from the famous '40s closet
and the gaze out through the window. Always. Her
demented flapping. Her churning. Her never keeping still.

We called her blueberry because she usually smelled of Eau
de Cartier.

We called her April though she usually became
November or March with the same realist
docility. She was a woman or a woman. Heavy
like the honey that gave her eyes color. Sky-like.
Unfinished. About-to.

It was enough to invoke her in the congregation of the feminine we
for her body to make all of us neutral.

She traveled at high speeds and not alone. One of her hands
went always in one of death's. So
she felt safe. Protected from the wings of midday
and from the whitest weight.

When I lived on the Other Side of the Line, silent
and exhausted, inside a Silence of Years and unwashed
for days, I asked myself, frequently, if someone like that
existed.
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Sketched, color head shot of Tommy Pico
"Tommy Pico Filibusters Mortality with Poetry"

“Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Feed (Tin House) is, like a social-media feed, a scrolling, constantly refreshing 'now,' an adrenalized present that contains many versions of the past, including the past of the feed itself....Pico’s model for thinking is a brand-new one, and impossible to separate from its contemporary context."

via THE NEW YORKER
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What Sparks Poetry:
Karen An-hwei Lee on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s “Farolita”

"Today, as I re-read this poem, I enjoy the way it yields to light, as if the paper strip changes into a page, and the page of the poem into a farolita, or vice versa. In this way, it’s mostly about light without saying the word light more than once. It blurs the boundaries of thingness and mystery, obliquely pointing us to tangible and intangible realms of knowing."
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