Tommy Pico - Junk

MORE PRAISE FOR TOMMY PICO Funny and honest and wickedly clever. SHERMAN ALEXIE Pico is a poet of canny instincts, his lyric is somehow so casual and so so serious at the same time. He is determined to blow your mind apart, and... you should let him. ALEXANDER CHEE Mix of hey thats poetry (uncanny resistance) with hey thats a text and smashing goals & fulfilling them along the way & saying my parents fulfilled them. Doing it differently being alive & an artist.

I love this work. Unpredictable & sweet & strong to continue. EILEEN MYLES The self-conscious labor of these poems explores a culture of asides, stutters, stammers, and media glitches. Its no wonder Tommy Pico manages to name and claim identity while also reminding us of his (and our!) limitlessness. JERICHO BROWN A poet who will not hesitate calling out winter as a death threat from nature, Tommy Pico hears the wild frequencies in the mountains and rivers of cities. The marriage of extraordinary sharp writing with the most astute commentary on almost every possible thing a human will feel, think, do, dance like, or smell like.

CACONRAD On the narrowing frontier between song & speech, memory & oblivion, future & no future, Native & American, IRL is Heraclitan, a river of text and sweat, whipping worlds into the silence of white pages: a new masterpiece. And a new kind of masterpiece. Its a lyric epic of desire whose hero renounces heroism. ARIANA REINES A gleeful combination of exuberance and threat. SIMONE WHITE Pico centers his second book-length poem on the trap of conforming to identity stereotypes as he ponders his reluctance to write about nature as a Native American... In making the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY , Starred Review [ Nature Poem ] finds Pico incorporating or indirectly referencing his surroundings in freewheeling, intimate verse, while turning a humorous lens on life as a queer man. OUT MAGAZINE Humor lays the groundwork for a hard truth and, for poet Tommy Pico, that hard truth is about living as an indigenous person in occupied America.... Picos poetry builds a contemporary Native American persona, one that occupies multiple spaces simultaneously: New York City, the internet, pop music, and Grindr. Its an identity thats determined to be heard by the culture at large. THE ORGANIST /KCRW Instead of following the conventions of the pastoral tradition, in which nature is revered, Pico adopts a tragicomic view. On the one hand, the land of his native people can be described with great reverence, desert nights that chill and sparkle and swoon with metal/ lighting up the dark universe.

On the other, that same landscape carries and extends legacies of racism and genocide that Pico is determined not to forget. THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Pico has pulled me out of a poetry slump. His poems make me want to live with more poetry, to read, write, and revel in poetry as a form that does not have to be a container. BROOKLYN MAGAZINE Few people capture New York, queerness, and the artful use of hashtags in a poem quite like Tommy Pico. NYLON Copyright 2018 Tommy Pico All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pico, Tommy, author. Title: Junk / by Tommy Pico. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002485| ISBN 9781941040973 (paperback) | ISBN 9781941040980 (ebook) Classification: LCC PS3616.I288 J86 2018 | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002485 First US Edition 2018
Interior design by Jakob Vala www.tinhouse.com Frenching with a mouthful of M&Ms dunno if I feel polluted or into itthe lights go low across the multiplex Temple of canoodling and Junk food A collision of corn dog bites and chunky salsa to achieve a spiritual escape velocity Why am I in this cup holder? B/c yr bubbly, dummy But I feel squeeze cheese uneasy In Faggotland coupling is at best delicate precarious & rarefied Eggshells At worst, a snipe hunt Love in the time of climate change Should I be nervous? No, its too dark in here for that Theres light and a screen & our moon faces, reflecting This is an epic, dummy Get yr muse Hail Janet Jackson, patron saint of Eternal Utility but Selective Relevance I whisper Feedback , feedback into the bedding Usually when you gag its bc something needs to come out So it strikes me as funny ha ha funny to gag while trying to stuff someones whole Junk in Everything that can cross I am crossing: eyes arms shoulders Back to bed, come back here The air is heavy feathers in midsummer, literally and metaphorically in my foul apt above the chicken slaughterhouse where we wheeze awake Yr bangs look real perf n coiffed n strangely I smell like horror burgers n you smell like lavender doves and all the best stuff Yr comforting, like getting fucked on an empty stomach Funny but a lil obvious like a wrecking ball factory going out of business I feel held up, like yr examining my x-rays and nothings broken Im like why does this meaty yuppie man want me to wake up in his arms but Janet says leave yr worries behind Im trying to close my eyes Im trying to close my eyes Im tryin to close my Shudder yr forehead against mine tectonic San Andreas in the West Village karaoke piano gay bar whatever I still cant close my eyes I just spent $13 dollars on this margarita Black Velvet is loud and extra theater kid in the world around us This is where you come to lose yrself and This is where I feel extra jagged Junk not immediately useful but Im still someone I cant stop lookin at ppls Junk generally so u can imagine how hard it is at the gym I try to keep eye contact but yr orbs soft n breathless glow their orblight all over mewere seeing subarctic farming in Alaska for the first time Green in the hazel country: thats what Id call the color of yr eyes Squeeze an hour before my weekend in Philly just to chill n make out wink-wink and get yelled at by a jerk squad cruising past us in a royal blue rust bucket in Queens n thinkin about you brings a rush of warmth like a stiff drink Settles over my rocky butte Interest sparked like a neon pink band sweatshirt A tabby-fat heart Im a brick in stadium lights like so fantastically broken but Im gummy peachy keen Junk gets a bad rap because capitalism Junk isnt garbage Its not outlived its purposeJunk awaits its next life Google viral vs bacterial , then try to sleep I had a tweet once called Netflix & Pills that went sort of viral and you said you were in a viral video dancing on a patio with a group of gay norms (of course) on Fire Island (of course) in a thong (of course) and it made me want to punch a pigeon Ppl buck like fuck when they feel their self-esteem is under siege Shame is isolating I write very specific baths What kind of grey scrutiny do you cast into the mirror? And if being pinned down by light, the squirming My roommate found an unused juicer at his job Two story thrift store between a methadone clinic and wild mushroom truffle oil chicken tikka masala pizza In common thrift store parlance, black leather vegansas in the verb to become vegan if its a gift My first question is can you put ice cream in that and still call it juice? I unzip yr pants with my teeth in the denim jacket afternoon and Im as surprised as you Hoover maneuvers The benefit of sober knob-slobbing Bottom lip only bleeds a little bit and its hard to imagine zippers do much else but reveal yr Junk Cookie dough brownie vanilla frozen yogurt swirl wipe Whenever we finish n I stare directly at you, you act like I spilled something Jump up as if to get a paper towel and hang in the kitchen evading my peepers Is this what youd call Hart Crane-ing Is saying goose flesh instead of goose bumps evil incarnate Is it wrong 2 call yr partner a mirror in the sense that when were together Im with myself in a way I cant escape A train whistles in the distance I court containment An octopus hugged in a box but you say being seen is a prison Were buffering pretty hard all over each other I am face 2 face with the perfectly tweezed eyebrows of anxiety You cant curate yrself with abandon Read: to look at carefully The covers up to our shoulders we lie in the couchbed of our preconceptions, separating I steady walk back to the land where I dunno u Took you long fuckin enough Now Im stupid and sugar-free and frothing The only thing harder than writing is quitting candy And the only thing harder than quitting candy is walking all day and buttering into bed in my body Now that Im fully inhabiting my cement maybe Im closer to the sacral joy of thinking into my ribcage? Convention says a book shd be this long but Im only interested in writing as long as you want to read in one sitting My aura is a strawberry shortcake dessert bar and the popular American corn snack Funyuns My safe word is Go to hell Katy Perry pronounced Catty Im writing a sitcom about butts and counting called Number Two The tagline is turn the other cheek Most times Im a maniac, other times losing an arm wrestling match Sitting for longer and longer but paying less and less attention, evolutionarily Is a load easier to swallow with a we Weve known for centuries that time is a bossy bird curdler Protrude from the green and calling it bud Sometimes you need to read something more than once My co-pilot is Mary Jane The theme is harmony of a gradient Lets hold hands and walk to the water taxi in matching tank tops but we call the tank tops wedges and the wedges are a Chipwich and our Cherry Cokes are a summer afternoon where we cant do anything but lean into the grass at that carousel park in Dumbo with the lap of the river and the dollhouse of lower Manhattan face-fucking us while we neck and, later, face-fuck The days are burnt packets of fake sugar in Faggotland and Sundays are the blurry worst Im takin notes in therapy like be more in the moment Everyone, they say, is trying to quiet the buzz but here in the white waves in the ring of yr absence I chafe to chatter Leap into a scream of swans rubbing their swan cocks against the waters ass Starving Junk in the sticky soda of my boy meat Spit on that rock hard narrative make it glisten fuck oh fuck My head a rabid Sega frantic 16-bit divination My hands huge Venn diagrams: the middle is where I miss you filling me Honey, in the raw Its odd to feel someone slip away drilling their Junk inside you The sky is still and shy and surfing News Flash Predictions are insecure but here r the rainbow roads possible paths: Cum delta Choke my loneliness daddy More graphics more resolution more jagged chin cliffs more anarchist sex dolls more jewel teeth more tears on the pizza more hungry boy somewhere in the noise machine The fat Junk wags against my throat Junk is charming in the hallows Dude leans into me like cigs half asleep you know how some ppl are workaholics Well Im an alcoholic Todays jaw lick click clocks sops the syrup leaking from my mores I mean pores One more time plz can I ride plz just one more time I have the tightest pinkest purse Sorry clutch Lets play a game called sociopath, or gay man Lets bottomless brunch Lets Lets Lets petal bagel w/ strawberry tofu cream cheese toasted snickerdoodle smoothie fuchsia pure adrenaline hole bellinis Ill eat it daddy baby Im the opposite of a foodie Im like a junkie Dont blame the Junk for being discarded Hey do you do you remember in the free-from-winter but not-quite-spring after poets brunch with Molly Amy Chelsea and Sarah Jean we went traipsing thru slushy Williamsburg and wound up at that store Junk where u bought all those old matchbooks for a living room conversation piece I grabbed a June Jordan near the door as we entered the labyrinth and read random gripping lines while you lifted dusty old china wiry broken radios n hopeful cassettes We got to the counter you took the book from me tossed it with the matches and said my treat Well I told u Id write it into something I am in the Junk shop of my 30s A weird thing happens when u enter: nothing You look up to a sea of button ups and cuffed jeans and casual pomade flip-dos Objectively, my father is a tribal chairman and Im his speech writer I started one on the back of a bill for therapy where Dr. John tells me Go with the first glass pearl or arrowhead or whatever Says I cant be wrong I like to read poems one at a time Word for word at first Try to strip them and see their bones before, eventually dressing them in my clothes Smellin of my orange Hermes toilet water and then BOOM June Jordan reminds me to call my mother Receive the beached bottle Crash it against some pop rocks So dizzy I swear to god Id smash my face against the mirror if I wasnt on my way to Shake Shack again OK so then finally I write my version of the poem Replacing the unimportant gods w/ peanut butter cookies and Apollo with Shake Shack or fracking which my mom says caused another earthquake in Oklahoma n nearly reaches the end of her sentence b4 breaking into the chorus from New York, New York Apollo is just a cracked statue & were moving on to the wildfires in Indonesia Bobby Flays rum punch Whoever thought up heaven must also think were really gullible These days no one can stand up in a movie theater w/o me thinkin its all over White men open fire My brain is a kiddie pool filled with pinwheels & Oreo dust Ppl are too busy callin themselves poets to notice the canary died I have only ever gotten better at being my color, w/ the banded lines and the tremors and the blues The smell of pumpkin pie cooling Chomping thru a whole baked brie wheel We go deep & we dont get no sleep Everyone is reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up basically an anti-junk manifesto but it has a point You should be accountable to what you touch The sound of Styrofoam rubbing on Styrofoam Is it possible to manifest desire I mean to consider yrself fly as fuck without anothers recognition Touch all this Junk Are hands made for anything but touchin yr body, is a ponder for almost every Janet jam Consumed with being acceptable Dummy, thats never been in yr vocabulary Yr thinking of exceptional, duh Its cool, they sound similar The older I get the more people move to the city turn 26 fascinated by the wacky G train Holy shit , the birthday boy just puked The JMZ grinds its wheel teeth behind you Embarrassment is so scalding sometimes in a February freeze I remember the night you vomited on me after wed made out just to warm up Self-hatred is a sweltering disease not cured by living in the pathogens at a mustache party The chunks dribble down yr glued-on Fu Manchu There is a kind of waltz to being that drunk But Im getting into hero territory Everything new is just something to forget unless you still have the mustache to prove it San Locos surprisingly addictive sangria Terracotta breaking The engine of capitalism: dope, dicks, misc bullshit Junk is its accumulation Not as indistinct as thing not as dramatic as trash Its important to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories Custard is like the most disgusting word I thought the point of seeing each other was to see each other How is being seen by me a bad thing? Dudes shd talk less generally and def talk less about music Yr reputation recedes you I call it aggressive mediocrity Comfort food is a perky euphemism Oblivion food may be a touch too negs Why arent more things horchata I cant see exactly where the binder clips begin and the half used Best Buy gift cards end Is it that sight is possessive? The way to see is also to apprehend? It cant be that sight is isolating Its like taking a dip With the water on all ends you are suddenly your whole entire skin The only thing funner than a Junk shop is wig shopping Wigs are possibly the only thing Id find suspect at the Junk shop Its hard to trust an old wig Day 17: I found freshwater and food The water was in a fountain at the gym The food was in a protein shake container, also at the gym Sadness makes me punchy, but Im a lover A boy w/ the clear skin of a plant-based diet and whose sharp edges put the pro in protein has started saying whats up to me in the locker room Ive always wondered why ppl use religion to justify their prejudices cos shouldnt yr religion be challenging you to undo them? And then I meet gym ppl and Im like eyeroll Maybe religion is just a place where ppl fortify their fears I look at him then look at me in disbelief Hes like the morning and Im like crud underneath a toenail My stupid waterbed body Shame is such a shutdown sucking feta from an olives soul Oh he def has an edible butt says someone out of the void which means some butts are edible and some butts are inedible Incredible Do I have an edible butt Edible butt Edible butt Thats pardon the expression bullshit Edible is the birthright of all butts I hate gay guys so much Theres this idea that only some bodies are worthy of desire and the others dont even exist And from the guts of my anger, this glowing I dunno Ive stopped counting the days The anger snowdrifts So many ways of seeing that reveal and when the anger gets replaced by empathy and I feel you, its almost sadletting go of our hazel country The impotence of Junk Birthday cake scented candle The bartender getting too drunk on 5 dollar margarita cheeseburger happy hour Sirens call attention toward tragedy Land is the trauma of lava The islands squeezing from the deep Fall came quick Beirut Baghdad Paris Mizzou Yemen Turkey Niger Calais Allepo Egypt Chicago Indonesia Radiation from Fukushima is in fact all over the Pacific Open carry men show up at protests An Arab guy in Astoria beaten in his bodega by white ppl tellin him Go Home Milk-toned Oregon militias bellow Give us back our land in the most unironic ways Does Americas shirt look eggshell-white or more like white-panic? The problem with pizza is it keeps getting eaten The J train is stalled and another part of Brooklyn is on fire Sirens dry rub the brittle morning In 2011 I lived in the 11th arr. In a month I was finally able to order a pig shaped princess cake in nearly coherent French AND correct Euro at the boulangerie with yellow frosting curtains and the picnic heat The firm lady at the counter, who for weeks spied me silently point at the croissants and raspberry tarts and chicken baguette n fling whatever coins, gave me a lil wink I suaved home victorious First Kumeyaay in Paris with my little pink treat Junk loves reflection Two buskers sang Hey, Joe on Canal St. Martin n waved me over to sip 1664s and neck Our wobbly night at the firefighters ball betting which ones would wink back and giggle bubbles into our weak vodka crans Today municipal workers scrub blood off those streets Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.