..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.
..There’s morning cigarettes.
..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream
..Pearls and scars
..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.
..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.
..There’s no need to rebuild anything.
..Now’s the time for whores to kill their clients, children in the wake of school shootings to start assassinating politicians, true artists to start murdering bad (fascist) artists, etc.
..A Posadism in reverse, ensuring that no future ever happens, a vanguard to destroy all vanguardism, castration and sabotage of SpaceX men, all space men.
..No, I don’t think I care about poetry anymore. She was the last girl I’ll read poetry with, the last girl who cared about poetry.
..One no longer reads or writes poetry, cares about poetry, but still goes underground, into clandestinity, to fight on behalf of poetry, against death, or the cult of death, fascism.
..There are whole dark ages, ages of ice, on Planet X where all poetry disappears from the surface of the planet, only to reappear, for no apparent reason, in some epoch or other. Poetry is a young person’s art, on any planet, though it grows senile with the universe, youth itself becomes the night, water sobbing, the last night…
..In his youth, the detective had wandered the criminal streets of Salonika on the eve of its apocalypse, the Metaxas years, his people were gangsters, Sephardic Jews, old ladies hawking wares, foreign whores, honest cops: the few honest cops who only exist in books, alcoholic and melancholy, with pained eyes, unflinching amid the horror, until something so ghastly happens, some senseless femicide, dazzling and obscene, that even he flinches, even he turns away.
..Planet X: persephonic grave of every femicide from every planet. Women murdered at birth, who hate themselves, whose bodies have been violated, whose psyches have been mutilated, whose sexuality has been stolen from them, trans women who got called faggots, never had a childhood, women who lie around in bed and smoke cigarettes on front porches all day long, hide from the sun, prefer the night, have no secrets left to tell.
..Even here, on a fatherless planet, a planet with no fathers, one may give birth to one’s father’s child, that is always a risk, you never know who’s cumming inside you.
..She dreams of a world of snowy sleep outside the window that never opens, leads only to a dark passage called “childhood,” called “country of birth,” called “sex,” called “anhedonia,” called “you can never come back.”
..It’s my liver, her mom says, and she bursts into tears before hearing any diagnosis, it’s simply enough that her mom’s body is a site of illness and fallibility.
..Her mom’s okay, though, will be back on her feet in a week or two.
..Her mom dying of pancreatic cancer in Hastings-on-Hudson, on morphine. She reads her old love poetry from the year 1968, which she has to admit is not very good: sentimental and somehow also homophobic (one poem is called “Ballad of the Invert”). The house is dark and cold and cavernous, even in the summer, which gives way to autumn, which simply augurs and waits for winter, when her mom will die.
..She thinks of the girl who loved her and realizes that she never wanted love, the girl’s or anyone else’s. What did she want? A certain integrity, not to be choked by the contingent collage that was her body, sometimes to be choked during sex, useful work, a voice that tells the truth, as much as possible, to be able to get drunk in the evenings in peace, meet a man with an eight-inch dick at a bar, bring him home, he leaves at dawn.
..When she thinks of her youth she thinks of an endless insomnia, fleabites and cockroaches, UTIs, eye infections, mouth sores, concussions, catastrophe.
..Her words on the phone become increasingly jumbled, nocturnal: “I go sleep,” “through your eyes I see,” “a little coke, well, a lot,” “two nights ago,” “another world,” “I have things I need to say, but first I must find clarity, inner clarity, because without clarity we are lethal to the ones we love,” “I miss you,” but she’s not talking to anyone, there’s no one on the other end of the line, whoever it was hung up, stopped listening, got impatient, died of a broken heart.
..Old video footage from 1958-1960, New Haven, Connecticut. Gentle harp music playing in the background. Her mom is three years-old. She hands a doll to her little sister who’s sitting on a blanket on the grass, clapping. Her mom smiles at the camera. They look uncannily like their adult selves, as if nothing has changed, no time passed, or as if time could not touch the most essential features. In another shot the two of them, wearing winter coats, are sliding down a slide at a playground, older sister cradling younger sister. Now they are on the swing-set. She, the daughter, is heartbroken, as if time should have ceased at this very moment, been preserved forever, not on video, but in reality. As if light and motion were too precious to simply pass through the membrane of this world. Now it is Christmas. Her mom, wearing a red plaid dress, unwraps her present, does a dance, goes over to hug a woman who isn’t her mom, who gives her a single kiss. Now the woman who isn’t her mom helps her little sister unwrap her present. In grainy footage, from a second or third-story window, the whole family can be seen together, strolling across a lawn, or maybe an airport tarmac, the tall Slavic professorial figure of her grandfather holding the younger girl in his arms, her mom by his side, dancing, her grandmother a little off to the side. Now a birthday. The two sisters again. Her mom blows through a party horn. There are four candles on a chocolate cake. No, actually, this is two birthdays, a week or so apart, the first is her mom’s sister’s birthday (she’s blowing out two candles), then there’s her mom’s birthday (the cake with the four candles). Her mom makes a funny face, keeps blowing through the party horn, there are a number of children in these shots, all wearing silly birthday hats, children whose names are no longer known. The children play while the adults look on, with staid benevolence. Another summer now, the two sisters running around on the lawn. Another Christmas. Now the younger sister can open her own present (a picture book). Now the whole family is in a car, a dark green VW bug, loaded with boxes, a large suitcase fastened to the roof. Presumably they are moving, to San Diego. They all wave goodbye. Who’s taking this footage? They drive off past bare trees in the snow (Tarkovsky snow). Goodbye!, they wave.
..The next summer Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in the Congo, though that’s not in the footage, obviously.
..The twentieth-century lives on in her like a corpse that has yet to be buried. Which is maybe why she fell in love with a girl who didn’t remember the twentieth-century, who was born in 2002, when she was seventeen years-old.
..At times she is in her own mother, who herself is dreaming of some nineteenth-century ancestor, one thing always being a parody of another.
..At times she is in the Matryoshka doll of her grandmothers’ wombs, in the gonadal cells of developing feti who are as yet strangers to one another. Her parents were born weeks apart in the year 1955. Her dad’s birthday is November 7, the day of the October Revolution. He used to make fun of the Russians for using “the wrong calendar,” but her grandfather (her mom’s dad) used to celebrate Orthodox Christmas in January.
..I’m not well, the girl she loves says. I don’t know how to communicate myself right now, I don’t know, my wisdom teeth, I’m getting time out, the infected time in my mouth, I feel down and silent. As if in her absence the girl she loves has become mute, her mouth overgrown with gnashing teeth, sores, cancerous aphasia.
..The truth is she’s been sleeping all day, keeping the blinds drawn, in a kind of daze, doesn’t remember what day it is, where she is, who she is, she’s in Oakland but she might as well be in L.A., the girl she loves is in L.A. but she might as well be in New York, etc: one place, one body, being only a parody of another.
..She used to say when we are together we are four, since one implies two, a smile implies a secret face, a present implies a past, a name implies another (deadname), a goddess implies an empty shrine, paradise implies hell, fucking implies some other way of fucking, involuted bodies, the phallus of empty space, a dick’s cunt, reverence implies a hidden contempt, words imply silence, silence implies a flower, a flower implies a colonizer poet, a colonizer poet implies an empire, an empire (sepulchre) implies a neo-memory, a neo-memory implies oblivion, oblivion implies a calendar, a calendar implies the missed apocalyptic hour, the missed hour implies a serpent, a serpent implies the necessary evil, the necessary evil implies matter, matter implies desire, desire implies undesire, and so on and so on…
..What did Heidi say yesterday? You are mourning the buildings in the city that you two built together, wandering the gorgeous and desolate streets, but meanwhile, she’s abandoned the city, in fact she’s left the entire planet…
..But which planet?
..On the phone, after a week of not talking, the girl she loves says, no, we are not saying goodbye, if you are trying to say goodbye to me now then I am going to hang up. A tremulous note of panic in her voice. In which she hears: I will not let you go…This is all she needs, what she wanted to know, that the girl she loves still loves her, would follow her to the ends of the Earth, or some other world.
..Amal, depressed, not leaving their room much these days. They talk about Palestine, which they call Filastin, about Marian apparitions, hallucination of Palestine in the California desert, the total subsumption of human beings into the psychopathic value system of a world of extractive, militarized death, the crossing of borders, sacred but deadly, from which one never returns the same, penance, the infinity of penance, shame as a weapon of social violence (false, external shame) and the inward shame that liberates, sets us free, what it’s like to have experienced for oneself, in a manic week, the entirety of the Crucifixion, the wrong kind of love, the love that hurts, which we are wired but not ordained to desire, how one remembers things that did not necessarily happen to oneself, but to someone else, memories that also wound us, for which we are also responsible, etc…
..They smoke Amal’s hand-rolled cigarettes in the garden as the sun goes down. A sense that it’s all coming to an end. Still, they bring out trays with little fruits, sweets, water in a carafe, incense, make art (a tattoo on her right arm, juicy lips and a rose), work on the altar in the garden (Marian shrine, shards of multicolored glass reflecting a broken infinite self), talk about fucking, the last love affair, what it will be like to grow old…
..Another girl (sober anarcho-nihilist sweetheart whore) in her bed. They fuck for hours. It’s the first time she’s enjoyed sex in forever. She loves the perverse mirror, their fake tits bouncing up against each other, the way her pussy tastes, the way she cums, the way she says you’re such a bimbo, you’re the most beautiful, you have the biggest heart, you’re the most depraved, you’re the smartest, we’re the hot dyke apocalyptic bimbo whores, avenging sex angels, of everyone’s nightmares, everyone wants to fuck us, to be us, but only we get to fuck us, be us…She’s beautiful, has the sweetest smile, these sultry eyes, believes the world is ending, believes in burning down the burning world, they talk about trans dystopian fiction, Bataille, naturally, Venus, protector of whores, their cats, sobriety, they make each other laugh, feel good, though Leila doesn’t cum, naturally, she never does with another person, even the hottest girl she’s ever been with, she says she wants to help her (Leila) get into porn, everyone is always offering to make Leila famous, she forgets about the girl she loves, for awhile…
..Ultimately, she falls in love with beauty, at the end of the day, is an acolyte of beauty, desires beauty, makes offerings to beauty, which are also offerings to the void. Inwardly touched by the soul of another, she falls in and out of love when one dazzling image, one venusian apparition, gives way to another, or is superimposed upon another, such that the story of her life could betold in a series of faces, palimpsestic desire.
..She fell in love in the winter (purely, as an emanation of her own image that was coming-into-being), in the spring (manically, in confusion, with rage, almost), in the summer (with a girl who intrinsically, without effort, knew her soul, but could not bear its image, while in fact she could finally bear her own image and the image of another, the heartbreaking image of another, which is not enough, love never being enough), in autumn. She fell in love in each season and knew, at the end of it, that this is how it would always be, that everything has its season, passes away, that love, in the end, is a cold vacuity: photograph of death.
..You are the center of your world, Leila, the girl she loves says, and I can only harm you, act upon you, do things to you. She doesn’t think this is a fair criticism, but it might hold more truth than she’d like to admit. From the beginning, it was as if the girl she loves had been pursuing her, as if Leila were in fact the center (her art, her sorrow, her past), the girl she loves wandered in her landscape, mystic years in one month, it was erotic but also barren, the girl she loves had a concept called “love,” an infinite unnameable thing, “beautiful and wordless,” whose outline she tried to draw in the sand, she felt as if she were poised on a tightrope, that doom was ineluctable, that perhaps she might be caught, though she knew she wouldn’t, not by Leila, not by anyone, all Leila could offer was a spider web called “center of the world,” but the heart was lethal, dead, a body with no name.
..In the evenings, the girl she loves works on her poetry manuscript in another city. Leila feels that the answers are contained in the poems, but not in any individual poem, because when she reads one or two, she finds nothing, a negation, but in the totality there must be something, the secret name of their love.
..The future between them is catastrophe, then forgetting, then silence.
..The girl she loves has a body, presumably, but it is no longer the body inside her. Her body has been replaced by another body, the last one to share her bed. This is a story about whores, about three whores, it might seem as if one whore is the heroine, but actually it’s the other, and maybe the third.
..The spirit of the girl she loves is still inside her, alongside another’s body. One might live like this, Leila thinks, with the spirit of one, the body of another, just like how the second-wave terfs called trans women Frankenstein.
..An inconsolable butch talks to her about heartbreak: butch heartbreak. Usually she talks to her about eschatological death, the violent revenge of the colonized, death to Amerikkka, to Israel, etc. Leila feels the same, about death, about violence, but wonders how the butch can maintain such a constant fever pitch, because the truth is violence is exhausting, for Leila anyway, exhausting and bitter, violence hurts like a broken heart.
..It’s time to throw this body away, she thinks. Never before has it been more clear, blindingly clear, how everything that passes through her sensorium, into her body, the dead time of history’s last decade, all these galling words and objects, comes from the violent extraction, life-negation, of a place called “somewhere else.” One dies so that another can live a kind of parody of death. One is powerless to put a stop to all this, is complicit in this, feels an inexorable shame to breathe the air on Planet Auschwitz, the air in hell.
..Where are we going?
..Another day, for no reason.
..It was all so gentle, once.
..The graceful, agile image of adult male bodies coursing through turquoise water in her backyard swimming pool as a (secret) trans girl of three or four. They excited her. She confused these bodies, through instinctual metempsychosis, with the sea lions she saw at the beach when she visited her grandparents. But it was the image of a girl one afternoon, a guest of her parents, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, that transfixed her, enraptured her, filled her with a yearning for death, though it wasn’t death, “death” was the name for the thing she lacked a word for. Not knowing how to swim yet, she threw herself into the pool, hoping to be saved.
..The concept of “another country” before crossing any border.
..Except, of course, the obscure border between non-being and being, and that between the womb and this brutal thing: journeys of which she still carried traces of memory.
..The immense gratitude she felt only many years later for having been born, for having been given the gift of witnessing. It was witnessing, wonder, that brought her closest to God, and witnessing’s twin, other face, desire.
..In the end her life had been a fever dream in which sex and sentimentality mingled to form the name “love.” Sentimentality was a way of prolonging sex, drawing it out into a contemplative dimension. Love was the true unnameable thing that would never arrive, whose arrival was infinitely postponed, like one of those nightmare blurs Kafka called a “letter.”
..What she could not express with her body, in a letter, what she could not know with her eyes, what failed inside her: this offering, a nameless grave.
..Leila, Heidi says, laughing, I’m going to let you in on a little secret, years ago I fell in love with a stripper I would go see, I mean it was bad, we would have so much fun together but I was constantly running to the ATM, one day I had to get on a plane and live in another city for awhile. Heidi is always talking about doomed love, unrequited love, love that’s impossible in its molecular structure, and the subsequent need for flight, for physical distance, for forgetting. So she knows what it’s like to be a sex worker in love with another sex worker, the kind of obsessional love found in Proust’s dandies. They think only men are horny, she says, but we’re hornier. It feels good to give in to desire, Leila says, to pursuit, something wanton and desperate.
..It’s no longer that I fear death, Leila says to Harvey one morning in Sacramento, nor do I seek any particular thing in this life, what’s left of this life. What haunts me is the fear of what’s going to happen in the near future, this apocalyptic fascism, the violent end, and not being able to choose my own death, not being able to leave on my own terms. Harvey says that when the time comes, it won’t be a problem, they already have the fentanyl. Thank you, she says. They go outside to smoke on the curb, the same spot where a month earlier Harvey had first told her about their plans to die. The trees in Sacramento are so beautiful, Leila says. A tuxedo cat, whom she remembers, walks by.
..That night, back in her own bed, in Oakland. Everything I lived for, she thinks, was ghostly, and now I myself have become a ghost. The dead no longer speak, and yet language is nothing but death.
“Holy water cannot help you now/Your mysterious eyes will not help you/Selling your reason will not bring you through/The desperate kingdom of love/There’s another who looks/From behind your eyes/I learn from you how to hide/From the desperate kingdom of love/And at the end of this burning world/You’ll stand proud, face upheld/And I’ll follow you, into heaven orhell/And I’ll become as a girl/In the desperate kingdom of love…”