Atopia. Sandra Simonds

the queasy tides of history not

      on our side and felt guilty and told no one.

      The managerial class will punish us

      with their monotonous, grueling blue eyes.

      They will paw at our gates

      and the houses will split open

      as they go further in their quest

      to forge digits, hemorrhage data.

      Their constituents concentrate

      on numerals as if their codes

      were constructed by nuns.

      Their unfailing power turns on itself

      like love poems of pure possession,

      like troubadour fantasies they tie

      weights to your body and push you

      gently into the blood river.

      The factories in the background

      are only imagined. They pump

      and huff to transfix mimesis

      like the face transplants of memes.

      Flocks and flocks of stars

      constellate the barbed wire

      borders of the nation state.

      This is where they plant cheap pine.

      These kinds of trees don’t communicate with each other.

      This is not the ecology of the forest,

      it’s the ecology of a tree farm.

      They create and destroy themselves for us

      with no tie to the future or the past.

      They used to make turpentine here.

      A lot of workers tortured

      in the convict leasing programs.

      The company store was the only place to buy anything.

      You worked all day in the swamp,

      then you got yellow fever and died.

      Rollover hedges all the way to the horizon.

      I flipped through the pages of the Star Wars Journal

      I bought my son. All the pages blank.

      This is not a dystopia, it’s wreckage.

      “Should I bleach my hair today and shave part of it off?”

      “I don’t think so.”

      “Why not? I need a look as drastic as the world we live in.”

      The Garden of Eden in sculpted information.

      “My love, your hair is long, wild, and beautiful.”

      Speculative cobwebs embroidered with flowers.

      Back in the love garden of eternal truth, I am

      as unhurried

      as the smallest

      creature left

      to revel in its own zigzag.

      Take the fucking wine away! Its red center,

      the Saturns of my splendor and my emotional

      landscape is cured for a day or a daydream is turned

      into the vicious news cycle reeling in pain.

      Destroy my body, take away the wine and the drugs

      and the centers of my thinking

      so naked before you.

      Take away the music and the car and the job,

      take away my body

      and, once and for all, fuck riddles.

      There is nothing mysterious to do here:

      I am just goose bumps and nipples.

      That hail is rare in South Georgia

      That once my colleague saw a twelve-foot alligator on 319 before they divided the road

      That that was twenty years ago

      That I regret reading an article on what it is really like to have Trump-supporting parents

      That I feel bad for saying that

      That my kids are eating toast for breakfast this morning

      That when they don’t eat what I think they are supposed to eat, the guilt is overwhelming

      That I am a single mother