‘& O, bright star of disaster, I have been lit.’
— Nix Thérèse
Being rendered mostly invisible at my biggest family function of the year was a particular kind of sadness: offering myself to a space that barely claims me. I found myself looking for small balms to tide me over during the celebrations, and was drawn to how the crystal clear clarity of this voice shattered my muddle of emotions. Murmuring these lines to myself in the parking lot broke me open: “i pick up the accent / of whoever i’m speaking to. no one wants / to fuck a sponge. no one wants to crush / on a ghost.” If this isn’t the summary of diasporic longing, what is? The sponge being so liable to be punctured and/or wrung out and the ghost resisting any concrete hold… these feel achingly familiar. Resounding the accent is a shallow bend towards fullness, but connection can’t just be a mirror or the same story parroted from a different mouth.
The rhetoric around coming to relationships “whole” annoys me often because culture isn’t given evenly. When you build yourself out of fragments and puzzle piece yourself into a life, you still recognize all the distance we can’t bridge. Can you come “whole” while dragging a shroud? “I am no insect / only an ache on loop in the window” is another beautiful juxtaposition of the intangible and the palpable: I can feel the swipes of wind against the panes, the body spinning just out of real contact while the gaze tries to make any lasting imprint. The speaker feels caught somewhere between ballerina and glitch: grace and anxiety merge until they’re one large murk. It’s easy to identify with the peach-pile “poured into the truckbed” and the receipts “faded to white” when the speaker lingers over them. In their singularity, their bruises and erasures don’t require an explanation of how or why to be felt. Rot is rot, and what’s dissolved is dissolved; their physical realities can’t be canceled. How I often wish I was offered the same sympathy, instead of fingers prying even deeper.