Banias - Anybody: poems

ANYBODY POEMS ARI BANIAS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 2016 by Ari Banias All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
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Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT for and CONTENTS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. ANYBODY These churchbells bong out one to another in easy conversation that wants to say things are okay, things are okay but things, they are not okay, and I cant trust a churchbell, though I would like to the way I can trust that in this country, in houses, apartments, there somewhere is a cabinet or drawer where its stashed, the large plastic bag with slightly smaller mashed-together plastic bags inside; it is overflowing, and we keep adding, bringing home more than we need, we should have to weave a three-piece suit of plastic bags a rug, a quilt, a bed of bags even, anything more useful than this collection this excess why am I writing about plastic bags, because it is this year in this country and I am this person with this set of meanings on my body and the majority of what I have, I mean, what I literally have the most of in my apartment, more than plants, more than forks and spoons and knives combined, or chairs or jars or pens or socks, is plastic bags, and I am trying to write, generally and specifically, through what I see and what I know, about my life (about our lives?), if in all this there can still betarnished, problematic, and certainly unevena we . Vito Corleone was a strong man, which is the main definition of a man I think. At the table I say, smiling, I am weak.

And everyone stares like, why would you admit that? Because its true. So here I am in the hallway again. Chain motel. Nondescript corporate wallpaper of a beigey patterned variety. Gender, the room I see myself walking into, all the rooms, any room, the number, the key corresponding, and of course the whole worlds in there. Of course if I want to talk to almost anyone I have to go in! Its too fucking small and were all in it.

But no, not all of you seem to hate it. Here where all my dreams of showing up to school in just underwear, flushed before a windowsill of bean sprouts nosing out of paper cupsI remember Eric suddenly, the fourth grade outcast, in a freakout pushing all the furniture around our classroom in brilliant chaos. I didnt realize then the world wouldnt fall apart if you did that. The corner of my desk got jammed into my stomach which was startling but not personal. Whats personal is being here with all of you. You know how you cant really look out a window without it being a thing youre doing, wistful or just framed in its way by you being you and the window being a window? It isnt casual.

Everything is out there to be looked at and not to look back at you who are small and like a god in your window. One feels invisible then but weve definitely seen people in the next building over in their underwear on a bed watching TV in the heat. Multiple times. The room where were in our underwear watching TV is exceptionally small, anyone would say so. But bigger too in its way because the shades are drawn and though were beaded in a light sweat no one can see us, we tell ourselves. Therefore the room is huge and contains all we want to imagine.

Given the heat and that we are somewhat slower to think in this humidity. Our near naked bodies in underwear weve decided are outside that room. We are eternally outside, two wildflowers in soil, faces upturned. The elements tend to us gently with rain and light but then of course large people in gloves come to poke plastic tags into the soil right beside us to help us be seen correctly though wed rather it all be a little less precise. Im not just a flower. At any given moment Im also a weed and medicinal and food for some bees and I dont know, just a thing in the wind, a thing in the ground.

I like the feel, the sound of that. But since Ive imagined this room it must be me who jabbed the tags into the soil. With my blurry picture and beneath it the scientific version of my name. Im watching myself watch TV in the heat in my underwear from the next building over, and honestly, I seem overly angry. I think we should talk.Can we all come to our windows? For example, I was once a sundress on a splintery swingset in Texas, and the world was made of yellow grass struggling to live in sand, sand beyond our fence, across the street, sand that could have drowned us but didnt. Because it was a border town, there were other others, so we sort of belonged.

The cacti, religiously stoic, held promise, as did the mountains, cast pink in the waning sun. In Illinois I tried to build a kind of Midwestern girlhood that failed and failed into the shape of a flute I played only high notes on. I stopped eating meat. Stopped speaking Greek. Became an ear. Now the only one I remember from that time is the girl who looked like a boy or maybe was one, who walked the same way home I walked, same coat, same sneakers, whom I never once greeted, just repeated his-her name to myself: Dominick? Dominique? Massively old trees canopied the cobbled streets.

The houses set so far apart youd hear neither argument nor song. Dominick. Dominique. Not a stitch of recognition passed between us. Thank you for the drawing you sent (it looks like a dandys hat with thoughts rushing into it) and for the photocopied passage about Agnes Martin & the self in art, gendered values of assertion vs. quietude, and where we expect to see whats deemed political.

Reading it improved my mood, which had been gloomy (and admittedly returned to a state of gloom again later), but that paragraph helped lift me briefly out of a despair Id been living inside of with some irritating regularity. The kind of irritation that never quite naturalizes itself, which may be its best quality, how unwieldy yet somehow consistent it is, like counting on being the one guest in the large cardboard costume at an overcrowded party in a small sleek New York apartment. Yesterday while sitting on my floor I began looking deeply into the living room rug, an old rug thats new to me, and thought, Id really like to disappear into this rugs dark blues and rusts and pinks, strange wobbly patterns that the more I look at them the more unsettlingly familiar they become, reflecting something both of this world and not, stiff flowering plants with geometric berries, robotic crabs wearing crowns, circuitry edged in spectral auras, coins on stems, spiders on crosses, pixelated like some crude early video game (only wool and warm and totally still), with four enormous blue ocean barges along its edge carting the rose-hued cargo of the soulwhere to? Someplace. Terrific trees throughout laden with books and lamps and lumpy top hats, red bejeweled boots, droopy scepters, ghosts with bowtie eyes, wafer cookies on legs, alligator-faced roosters atop bronze trays... On either end of the rug a giant cat maestro presides (as the man of the house might at the head of a dining table), levitating two plump cherry bombs, aimed at the four enormous ocean barges (carrying our souls! ) which most of the time I dont give consideration to and so step on daily. I told you to write a poem about pockets but you already wrote a paper on pockets in Dickens and I have read almost no Dickens to be honest but pockets what a staple of intimate transport both private and exposed functional and decorative some faux ones even printed on others in womens clothes hold nearly nothing intrigue me deeply they have so many ways of being prominent or discreet or altogether hidden buttoned snapped zippered flapped but then also those on fine suit jackets one has to slit the first time with a blade the care of that and how sexual it is but this isnt whats important about pockets pockets are dreams of negative space and possibilities potentials secret inside-outside places a pocket of thinking a pocket of resistance theoretical and cultural writings on pockets exist but as with Dickens I neglect them when it comes to pockets I prefer to think on my own I still at times imagine my thoughts in a small enclosure it helps me think better when actually I have a mind full of holes they breathe theres something sweet and forlorn about a pocket breached a torn pocket a pocket that cant hold whats important its one job a keeper and through the compromised place things escape down a pant leg or into the lining of a coat if its cold out one can feel a warm coin pass along the leg against the skin maybe hear metal strike sidewalk but not always, not always coins, maybe keys, if dropped on carpet or in a loud place not heard, or not a hole but a pickpocket, wind, carelessness, somewhere crowded when going through their contents in a hurry more and more of mine have holes as I get older Im too lazy to repair or notice only when wearing this parka, these pants, and picture when I get home the needle and thread in the drawer and then get home where my pockets no longer exist their relevance declines I forget today I saw an old friend in a strange yet handsome dark wool coat that struck me I couldnt say why, its eerie beauty and I told him so, he said there are no pockets its a prisoners coat All winter two giant snowballs stood in the center of the trampled schoolyard, & another one off to the side I felt foolish feeling bad for.