Pico - Nature Poem

PRAISE FOR IRL Tommy Picos epic poem is sad and funny and honest and wickedly clever with rhymes and rhythms. It is an utterly original aboriginal look at the world. I love it. SHERMAN ALEXIE 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 Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effector, most often, some combination of the two. THE NEW YORKER Brilliant, funny, and musical.... [Pico] invokes Gertrude Stein and Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyonc. Picos skillful rendering... proves to be entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the smartphone. PUBLISHERS WEEKL Y , Starred Review Copyright 2017 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 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Pico, Tommy, author. Title: Nature poem / by Tommy Pico.

Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056390 (print) | LCCN 2017010729 (ebook) | ISBN 9781941040638 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781941040645 Classification: LCC PS3616.I288 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.I288 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056390 First U.S. Edition 2017 Interior design by Jakob Vala www.tinhouse.com Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

The stars are dying like always, and far away, like what you see looking up is a death knell from light, right? Light years. But also close, like the sea stars on the Pacific coast. Their little arms lesion and knot and pull away the insides spill into the ocean. Massive deaths. When I try to sleep I think about orange cliffs, bare of orange stars. Knotted, glut.

Waves are clear. Anemones n shit. Sand crabs n shit. Fleas. There are seagulls overhead. Ugh I swore to myself I would never write a nature poem.

The sand is fine. They say its not Fukushima. I feel fine, in the sense that I feel very thinI been doin Tracy Anderson DVD workouts on YouTube, keeping my arms fit and strong. She says reach, like you are being pulled apart I cant not spill. Sometimes it, sometimes... what you see is what you glut.

There are sometimes insides. I cant write a nature poem bc its fodder for the noble savage narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, I say to my audience. Lets say Im at a pizza parlor Lets say Im having a slice at the bar this man walks in to pick up his to-go order Lets say his order isnt ready yet and hes chatty Lets say Im in Portland bc ppl dont tawlk to me in NYC Lets say hes like, meatballs are for the baby, pizzas for the little man, Caesar salads for the wife and the beer he points to the beer and then thumbs at himself, the beers for me . He has one of those cracked skin summer smiles He keeps talking like I want to hear him Like hes so comfortable Like everybody owes him attention Im a weirdo NDN faggot He puts his hands on the ribs of my chair asks do I want to go into the bathroom with him Lets say it doesnt turn me on at all Lets say I literally hate all men bc literally men are animals This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about. I dont like boys, men, or guys.

Dont like how they kick it on couches, laid back, calves cocked the neck muscles thrust up. Dont like their dumb biceps bouncing the thunderclap laugh choosing trucks over pink!? The musk the swoony wake, the misc bulges, stupid weight training Spot me bro I was like pfffft , I says yr kind of hard to miss? What they say to anyone ever in history, or in the locker room when they think no one is listening in a tight towel. Or everyday when they expect attention, ppl wide-eyed ears like satellites the words (apparently) torch torchin to truth. Dont like them tweeting, texting, um peeling rubber wetsuits off in the parking lot sweatpants no discernible underwear lookin like whatever Or! When they slick back swab the deck pocket square shoulders The wave, the fade, the bang bangs. Men dancing is fine tho. Or like maybe men in socks? I dunno I cant write a nature poem bc I only fuck with the city and my dentist is the only man wholl stick his meaty fingers in my mouth rn.

The office of my hummingbird heart rattles the sparkling office. Its okay , he says. Its kind of... Youll hear when I clap my hands, but you wont really care . Sooooo its like gas-induced sociopathy? Crickets. He twists the knob feeling bobs the biochemical deltacare rolls out to sea.

Cut off the head? and a body can jerk for minutes afterward. Is life more than a byproduct of nerves crunch crunch heave have you ever eaten rattlesnake? Not to be clich, but it tastes like chicken. Everything tastes like chicken, but then again I have shockingly little taste. Its hard feeling like a carcass bc u literally cant feel like a carcass. You feel around instead. I come around slowly, oxygen fuzzy dead bone spittlea hole in my head.

Winter is a death threat from nature, and I dont respond well to predation its not like summer, death in the form of barking men takin issue w/the short shorts and the preen and the queenly holding hands god forbid u step into the gnashing cold for a fizzy water and grapes, forget yr keys, the cell battery dies n yr roommates out of town with their holiday families plus mittens are dumb af AND its easy to fantasize abt snow when yr raised on the cusp of a desert Kumeyaay ppl arent built for winter like metaphorI mean metabolically and it happens, get this, it happens every. damn. year. Theres no exposure in Southern California, no clanging heat in San Diego. in LA? The snow comes in a can. A ghost. No. No.

A reanimation, a flourish of calendar art and novels with families in living rooms, huddled in a blizzards fist. We used the fireplace for its smoky tang. When rains came from the eyelids of the sky, I cd feel the land licking the roof of its mouth. Hella satisfied. Men smack the monoliths in Mosul back to stone and dust. Im devastated in the midst of Vicodin Thank god for colonialist plundering, right? At least some of these artifacts remain intact behind glass , says History Kumeyaay burial urns dug from context, their ashes dumped and placed on display at the Museum of Man.

Casket art, mantelpieces in SoCal social well-to-do living rooms A warden is seldom welcomed , I say. Lives flicker , says History I, too, wd like a monument , says Ego. Im abt to get fucked by Don Draper on a rooftop but stinging smoke wraps us like thick blankets I wake up like fuck did I have a cigarette last night , no dry sockets plz but its just my neighborhood on fireI rush outside the billow yanks across the sky and into Queens. Its an archive burning, a record storage building near the water. Singed bits of text rain onto the concrete, streets swallowed in fragments like a Sappho How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees is not something I wd include in a nature poem. Captive and being returned to the wild captive breeding and release program Marius the giraffe put down by his handlers at Copenhagen Zoo, dissected in front of patrons and fed to the lions literally fed to the lions in 2014 child slaves sleeping on fishing nets in Somalia, in Bangkok OkCupid asks whats worsea starving child or a starving dog, and Im like is this a fucking joke? Dragonflies experience a kind of quantum time, see a much richer spectrum of colors like a range of snowcapped mountains on molly and mushrooms and sherbet watercolors and Im supposed to believe were such miracles? Ray Rice punches his girlfriend unconscious on camera and drags her out of the elevator, and Im supposed to give a fuck about pesticides? Thats not a kind of nature I would write a poem about.