Borzutzky - The Performance of Becoming Human

THE PERFORMANCE
OF
BECOMING HUMAN

THE PERFORMANCE
OF
BECOMING HUMAN

Daniel Borzutzky

Brooklyn Arts Press | New York

The Performance of Becoming Human
2016 Daniel Borzutzky

Print ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-46-5

Cover design by Joe Pan. Interior design by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson. Edited by Broc Rossell.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means existing or to be developed in the future without written consent by the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by:
Brooklyn Arts Press
154 N 9th St #1
Brooklyn, NY 11249
www.BrooklynArtsPress.com

Distributed to the trade by Small Press Distribution / SPD
www.spdbooks.org

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Borzutzky, Daniel.
Title: The performance of becoming human / Daniel Borzutzky.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Brooklyn Arts Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015028529 | ISBN 9781936767465 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3602.O79 A6 2016 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015028529

Ebook Edition

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of the following journals and anthologies for publishing some of these poems: American Poets in the 21st Century: Global Poetics; Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing; Boston Review; Devouring the Green: The Cyborg Lyric Anthology {Poetry in an Era of Catastrophic Change}; Jai Alai; jubilat; Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas; Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary; PEN Poetry Series; Petra; Sprung Formal; and Your Impossible Voice.

Some of these poems were published in the chapbook Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! (Bloof Books, 2014) and others in Memories of my Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions, 2015).

CONTENTS

I live in a body that does not have enough light in it

For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light

Once, I walked around my city on a dying morning and a decomposing body approached me and asked me why I had no light

I knew this decomposing body

All that remained of it were teeth, bits of bone, a hand

It came to me and said: There is no light that comes out of your body

I did not know at the time that there should have been light in my body

Its not that I am dead

Its not that I am translucent

Its that you cannot know you need something if you do not know it is missing

Which is not to say that for years I did not ask for this light

Once, I even said to the body I live with: I think I need more light in my body, but I really did not take this seriously as a need, as something I deserved to have

I said: I think I need for something blue or green to shine from my rib cage

Other times when I am talking about lightness I am talking about breath and space and movement

For it is hard to move in a body so congested with images of mutilation

Did you hear the one about the illegal immigrant who electrocuted his employees genitals? Did you hear the one about the boy in Chicago whose ear was bitten off when he crossed a border he did not know existed?

I want to give you more room to move so I am trying to carve a space, with light, for you to walk a bit more freely

This goes against my instincts, which are to tie you down, to tie you to me, to bind us by the wrist the belly the neck and to look directly into your mouth, to make you open your mouth and speak the vocabulary of obliteration right into your tongue your veins your blood

I stop on a bridge over the train tracks and consider the history of the chemical-melting of my skin

Once, when I poured a certain type of acid on my arm I swore I saw a bright yellow gas seep out of my body

Once, my teeth glowed sick from the diseased snow they had shoved into my mouth when they wanted me to taste for myself, to bring into my body the sorrows of the rotten carcass economy

Once, I dreamwrote that I found my own remains in a desert that was partially in Chile and partially in Arizona

Was I a disappeared body, tossed out of an airplane by a bureaucrat-soldier-compatriot or was I a migrant body who died from dehydration while crossing the invisible line between one civilization and another

I was part of a team of explorers we were searching for our own bodies

In the desert I found my feet and I put them in a plastic bag and photographed them, cataloged them, weighed and measured them and when I was finished with the bureaucratization of my remains I lay down in the sand and asked one of my colleagues to jam a knife into my belly

She obliged

But when the blade entered my skin it was as if my belly were a water balloon

Water shot into the air

My skin ripped into hundreds of pieces and I watched as the water covered the feet of my colleagues who were here to document their disappearances and decomposition

It was at this moment that I saw light in my body not sun over the sand but a drip of soft blue on a piece of skin that had fallen off my body and dissolved into its own resistance

On the side of the highway a thousand refugees step off a school bus and into a sun that can only be described as blazing.

The rabbi points to the line the refugees step over and says: Thats where the country begins.

This reminds me of Uncle Antonio. He would have died had his tortured body not been traded to another country for minerals.

Made that up.

This is a story about diplomatic protections.

The refugees were processed through Austria or Germany or maybe Switzerland.

Somehow they were discovered in some shit village in some shit country by European soldiers and taken to an embassy where they were promptly bathed, injected with vaccines, interrogated, etc.

Their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B.

There was only one gag, says the rabbi, as he tucks his children into bed. So the soldiers took turns passing the filthy thing back and forth between the mouths of the two prisoners. The mother and son licked each others slobber off the dirty rag that had been in who knows how many other mouths.

You love to write about this, dont you?

I am paid by the word for my transcriptions. Just one more question about the gag.

He wants to know what color the gag was, what it was made of, how many mouths had licked it. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

They used their belts to bind them by the waist to the small cage they were trapped in.

Everything reminds me of a story about an ape captured on a boat by a group of European soldiers who showed him how to become human by teaching him how to spit and belch.

Everything is always about the performance of becoming human. Observing a newly processed refugee, the rabbi says: I have seen those blue jeans before.

At times like this, he thinks: I can say just about anything right now.

This is, after all, a bedtime story for the end of the world.

I am moving beneath the ground and not sleeping and trying to cross the border from one sick part of the world to another.

But where is the light and why does it not come in through your bloody f ingers?

You hold your bloody fingers before my eyes and there is light in them but I cannot see it.

You say: There are countries in my bloody fingers. I am interested in the borders.

Or: I am interested in the gas chambers in your collapsible little fingers.

You put them to my face and I see your hands open and in them I see a thick wall and a sky and an ocean and ten years pass and it is still nighttime and I am falling and there are bodies on the ground in your bloody hands.