Atopia
ATOPIA
Wesleyan Poetry
SANDRA SIMONDS
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
2019 © Sandra Simonds
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Richard Hendel
Typeset in Monotype Walbaum
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7919-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7904-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7905-8
5 4 3 2 1
Front cover illustration: Tropical palm leaves. NataliaKo/Shutterstock.
CONTENTS
Atopia
When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air—
So what is there
to be afraid of?
A cage of air. Baudelaire said
Poe thought America was one giant cage.
To the poet, a nation is one big cage.
And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?
Try to put a cage around your dream.
The cage escapes the dream.
I see it streak and stream.
Night is the insane asylum of plants—Raúl Zurita
Everyone dreams of the apocalypse, they are barfing
into their grief but I, love, dream of you, and I am old enough
to know this is not the apocalypse, and I am well-read
enough to know all of this was set in motion long
ago, plummet of seashells, the visions loud,
obnoxious even, yes, I try to ignore them, but to no avail,
the dead workers stream through my body, out my finger
tips towards the moon’s underlying reality, trumps, keys,
some move into hysteria then collapse or perhaps
this is a vision of souls surrounded by black clouds, layers
of breath, to close one’s mind to extraneous events,
life streaming from chambers, music as event and so,
love, I enter the scene before me, as many poets
have before, walk through the gates of the imaginative
space I have to create Dante, Milton, Plath, Lorde,
leave the body, leave the comfort and pain of the body,
enter the inferno, enter on the day of the Oakland
fire when thirty-six lives are lost, one life for each year of mine,
put my head to my knees, whisper, chant, sing, suggest,
rip up the text of my hair, the alephs of my hair,
my long black hair is a text and I will not cut it, my hair
is a parable, a fantasy, a stage, it is burning, turning
to snakes, witches, elves, it is an enormous
Frankenstein on fire and the warehouse went up in its mass,
and the body politic bled down, the dead queers, dead artists,
crisis of landlords and evictions, midwinter, I leave
this body behind, I had to see, I had to see what
was behind the mirror’s arrangement of energy
and madness, had to see through this furious parabola.
I am a terrible American
So suicidal
I am a terrible, suicidal American
who throws herself into your desiccated bank vaults
Yet I do not want America to kill me before I kill myself
I can’t stand my positive acquisitions
I throw them to the dogs like marrowless bones
I can’t stand my drinking
I hate the fires of money
I feel no nationalism
I feel no nationalism in my heart, my hands, my brain, or my pussy
I myself am worse than a rogue state
I feel peeled away from society
I will never leave my bed
I want to die in my bed with the covers over my head
The books I have written for other people sicken me like plague
The books I have written for so little money like a ghost tripping on the pavement to get to you
I will be forced out of my enemy’s hands like sweaty nickels in the wavy grasses
America, I am the moors you lack
My voice crosses you like some bleak financial awareness
I crash like a bombed-out calamity
I am no good for anyone
The vines of my thoughts are the cries of all the people and animals you kill
I am the home of the birds and that’s all I will ever be
Inside my heart is a boat of Noahs
The animals are cacophonous
I am the town washed away
I starve myself every day
I am the downed power lines of your literature
I spark up from the pavement like the jolting of a corpse
I am that corpse who jolts up and goes on a long walk
America, I am a long walk in your dying wilderness
I cross the bridge hopeless.
Give me back my dream of the swarm of bears
I