A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Ross Gay

How We Are Saved

Gathered at the side of my father's bed, his body still
warm to the touch, his eyes darkening like those of a fish
laid high on the river bank, the sun slipping through
the half-closed blinds into the cream-colored room—
we have come to dress him one last time.

To bend his arms, not for prayer, but to slide the sleeves
of the clean white shirt over, to pull each limb through—
pants, socks, shoes—till the body is clothed, readied at last
to meet whatever fiery light will embrace it first. The kiln,
the grave, love's small white cloud that arrives just before rain.

No, this is just a body. Clay and water. Hallow. What we shed
in the white room over words of prayer. What we weave of memory,
grace for grace, this already faded circle of thought and longing.
Oh, this body—grown more wind than flesh, even as the air leaves
his lungs not to return, there is a knocking at the door, something dark
and hopeful rising to my lips, the strains of a very old song. 

Neil Aitken

Q&A w/ Ocean

Q: How do you make sure your metaphors have real depth?

A: The reason why I emphasize the malleability of simile's impact is that, although syntax and diction can aid a metaphor towards its more luminous embodiment, the ultimate key to its success is you, the observer.

YOU have to look deeply and find lasting relationships between things in a disparate world.

In this sense, the practice of metaphor is also, I believe, the practice of compassion. How do I study a thing so that I might add to its life by introducing it to something else?

At its best, the metaphor is what we, as a species, have always done, at OUR best: which is to point at something or someone so different from us, so far from our origins and say, "yes, there IS a bond between us. And if I work long enough, hard enough, I can prove it to you—with this thing called language, this thing that weighs nothing but means everything to me.

Q: How do you avoid loneliness in a small town/ ecosystem?

A: I grew up in small towns in New England so this feels closest to home to me. I prefer small places because they demand/ are conducive to depth in how you negotiate their spaces. Seeing the same things over and over again trains the mind to discern for slightest changes, growths, transformations. Same goes with people. I never get bored with people, even seeing the same faces again and again. 

Ocean Vuong

Gesture

It is a gesture I do
that grew
out of my mother
in me.

I am trying to remember
what she
was afraid to say
all those

years, fingers folded
against her mouth,
head turned away. 

Beverly Dahlen

Interior Chinatown

The truth is, she's a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they're into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn about all the things they are and about all the things they will never be. 

Charles Yu

Looking for a Place to Land

I been circling
The side of my hands
Reserves are running low and I'm looking for a place to land
'Cause far too young I learned to fly
So I should know now as a man
How to come back down now
I'm looking for a place to land now

I've crossed oceans
Fought freezing rain and blowing sand
I've crossed lines and roads and wondering rivers
Just looking for a place to land
Now I've climbed the heights most weren't meant to understand now
I'm flying low
And I'm looking for a place to land
'Cause these once proud engines
They choke up now and then
Now, now I'm starting to lose my faith
But still looking for a place to land

Justin Townes Earle, rest in peace.

On Minor Feelings

Watching [Richard] Pryor, I realized that I was still writing to that institution. It’s a hard habit to kick. I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.

I didn’t know how to escape it.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.

Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principles of a bildungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It’s playing tennis “while black” and dining out “while black.” It’s hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given. After every print run of Citizen, Rankine adds another name of a black citizen murdered by a cop to an already long list of names at the end of the book. This act acknowledges both remembrance and the fact that change is not happening fast enough.

My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to the theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are “non-cathartic states of emotion” with “a remarkable capacity for duration.”

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. A 2017 study found that the ideology of America as a fair meritocracy led to more self-doubt and behavioral problems among low-income black and brown sixth graders because, as one teacher said, “they blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

 Cathy Park Hong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I've never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you'd come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I'd come back with your glass of water and you'd already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.

What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised—a number of whom, like cousin Victor, will get asthma from years of breathing the noxious fumes into their still-developing lungs. The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of phở simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people's closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet. It's a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop—until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables—bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages.

I won't stay here long, we might say. I'll get a real job soon. But more often than not, sometimes within months, even weeks, we will walk back into the shop, heads lowered, our manicure drills inside paper bags tucked under our arms, and ask for our jobs back. And often the owner, out of pity or understanding or both, will simple nod at an empty desk—for there is always an empty desk. Because no one stays long enough and someone is always just-gone. Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence. We will do this for decades—until our lungs can no longer breathe without swelling, our livers hardening with chemicals—our joints brittle and inflamed with arthritis—stringing together a kind of life. A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calfified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid.

I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change — not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone's shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in the narrative would occur — the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. "Make me young again," Lan said.

Ocean Vuong

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Linda Pastan

Live Update

They held views on the matter,
one way or the other,
of our awful American problem.
They watched the last even unfold and thought:
More laws. More guns. Less violence. Less coverage.
This, no, that, no, this,
with more or less certainty or stridency.
"This is the last straw." "How can we be this way?"
"It is our culture." "Our right."
"Isn't this the price of freedom?" "Isn't this abusrd,
grotesque?"
They are dead now.
They and their various views on the matter,
swallowed up suddenly by darkness,
their loved ones maddened with grief,
breaking things they've bought, pulling at their hair,
all that undeliverable protest at the void.
I think of others, alive today, soon to die,
(who knows when or whom, maybe you, or me,
or the him or her who's more to you than you)
who with more or less certainty hold views too
that will vanish into the dark with them
tomorow, the week to come, by this time next year.

Teju Cole

Sweet Song

What am I to do
Someone here is really unhappy
Put myself on the line
It seems I never got through to you
So I wean myself off slowly

I'm a darkened soul
My street's all pop music and gold
Our lives are on TV
You switch off and try to sleep
People get so lonely

I believe, I believe, I believe
Everything's out to sea
I believe, I believe, I believe
I believe that is the way it should be
I hope you feel the same

Everyone is dying
Stop crying now here comes the sun
I didn't mean to hurt you
It takes time to see what you have done
So I wean myself off slowly

I believe, I believe, I believe
Love is the only one
I deceive, I deceive, I deceive
I deceive 'cause I'm not that strong
Hope you feel the same

And now it seems that we're falling apart
But I hope I see the good in you come back again
I just believed in you

Blur

Me and My Shadow (MXMS)

The dark.

It’s a place some acknowledge from a distance, cowering in fear. To others, it’s hollow void is a welcomed solace; a destination of comfort and safety. For Ariel and Jeremy, otherwise known as “Me and My Shadow”(or MXMS for short), it’s their un-written reality. The two met by chance in a studio in the San Fernando Valley in late 2013; Ariel having just arrived in Los Angeles from New York City. What was to be a short writing session instantly blossomed into something poingent and deeply moving as their personal stories meshed into song over the coming weeks and months. The pair moved through the discovery that expelling love, death, pain, and fear into art brought instant relief not only to their personal lives; but became readily relatable to others navigating the broken state of our world and its current affairs.

Offering hope through honesty showered from broken beats, dark pianos, angry synthesizers, and Ariel’s unparalleled hypnotic voice, MXMS carves yet another name on the genre tree…funeral pop. With a gamut of releases and their first feature cinema score slated deep into 2017, MXMS challenges our darkness to come to light through sound and visual stimuli in the same blunt and dramatic fashion that the duo’s influencers Massive Attack, Tricky and others began during the renaissance of technological music.

“MXMS’s music frequently swells from lush yet painfully intimate lows to rousing and inspirational cinematic highs, demanding to be mined for a transformative film montage. The duo relishes straddling the fine line between light and dark–as well as navigating, and often deliberately disrupting, the fault line between their fierce desires to both shun industry norms, and to share their music with the world.”

-Kurt McVey for Interview Magazine

"Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been."

David Bowie

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."

Sylvia Plath

Here

Here is a region of abundant details
Here is a region that is seldom used
Here is a region that continues living
Even when the other sections are removed

Put your hand out of your pocket
Wipe the sweat off of your brow
Now it feels like a bad connection
No more information now

As it passes through your neurons
Like a whisper in the dark
Raise your eyes to one who loves you
It is safe right where you are

Here is an area of great confusion
Here is a section that's extremely precise
And here is an area that needs attention
Here is a connection with the opposite side

Here is many sounds for your brain to comprehend
Here the sound, it's organized into things that make some sense
Here there is something we call hallucination
Is it the truth or merely a description?

David Byrne

"Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you're at your worst."

Yara Bashraheel

Choi Jeong Min

in the first grade i asked my mother permission

to go by frances at school. at seven years old,

i already knew the exhaustion of hearing my name

butchered by hammerhead tongues. already knew

to let my salty gook name drag behind me

in the sand, safely out of sight. in fourth grade

i wanted to be a writer & worried

about how to escape my surname — choi

is nothing if not korean, if not garlic breath,

if not seaweed & sesame & food stamps

during the lean years — could i go by f.j.c.? could i be

paper thin & raceless? dust jacket & coffee stain,

boneless rumor smoldering behind the curtain

& speaking through an ink-stained puppet?

my father ran through all his possible rechristenings — 

ian, isaac, ivan — and we laughed at each one,

knowing his accent would always give him away.

you can hear the pride in my mother’s voice

when she answers the phone this is grace, & it is

some kind of strange grace she’s spun herself,

some lightning made of chain mail. grace is not

her pseudonym, though everyone in my family is a poet.

these are the shields for the names we speak in the dark

to remember our darkness. savage death rites

we still practice in the new world. myths we whisper

to each other to keep warm. my korean name

is the star my mother cooks into the jjigae

to follow home when i am lost, which is always

in this gray country, this violent foster home

whose streets are paved with shame, this factory yard

riddled with bullies ready to steal your skin

& sell it back to your mother for profit,

land where they stuff our throats with soil

& accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.

i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen

for what i am: a boundless, burning wick.

a minor chord. i confess: if someone has looked

at my crooked spine and called it elmwood,

i’ve accepted. if someone has loved me more

for my gook name, for my saint name,

for my good vocabulary & bad joints,

i’ve welcomed them into this house.

i’ve cooked them each a meal with a star singing

at the bottom of the bowl, a secret ingredient

to follow home when we are lost:

sunflower oil, blood sausage, a name

given by your dead grandfather who eventually

forgot everything he’d touched. i promise:

i’ll never stop stealing back what’s mine.

i promise: i won’t forget again.

Franny Choi

Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This... this..."; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Paul Goodman on the anatomy of silence, 1973

Love Ascended Between Us

Love ascended between us
like the moon between two palm-trees
that have never embraced.

The intimate murmur of our two bodies
made the cooing the sea-swell brings,
but the hoarse voice was stifled,
the lips turned to stone.

The yearning to encircle moved our flesh
illuminated our inflamed bones,
but our arms' desire to reach out
died away in our arms.

Love and the moon passed between us
and devoured our lonely bodies.
And we are two ghosts who search
and find each other from afar.

Miguel Hernandez