Curated by CC Calloway
Gabriella Andino
I’m flailing for peace allocating pieces of past autonomy
He without name flesh risen spinning in place
chocolate from ceiling reformation daunting
each planet i have yet to visit boil me last vision I am not tempted to miss him
Still, an island forms black sand keeps the shore
I am disgusted by this shit I’ve found at our front door
A week in Singapore and then many weeks More
I do not miss you
As i did before
I will explode soon
Facts fucks friendship
Fast done estrangement
Dig your toes into my skin
Let the cold permeate within
A witch
Never mother nor woman
Salt circles and them
Press me toward premonition
I felt love twice enough
I bench time
altar boy bending low
Kneading whore
Needing more
Never from man but from the core
Arrest this poem
I’m stealing more
Pity cheats on Terror
Ultimately I am too sad to create
Van Gogh minus the compulsion to create
And it’s here where the trees are asleep too
I have missed everything I thought I deserved, for too long
And now I grieve loss, because there is nothing else to hold on to
I said, “my world is right beyond the tree line, right past this lagoon”.
They stared at me while eating philly cheese steaks at the sandbar.
I guess it makes more sense to be here, with my terrifying Uber driver, my
terrifying job, my terror.
My terror in the unhung picture frames, in the N as in Nancy, in the coughing and
the sneezing in the room of no windows in the screen monitoring in the sense of
urgency I never wanted in the 12 tribes of Israel in the Starbucks and Chick-fil-a
boycotts, my terror.
And the Joy.
To know you’re out there. To hear you, feel you, away.
I feel you and I’m still here, today, in my terror. Do you feel my joy? Or are you in
terror too?
In what happened to me; what happened to me? What happened to me without
you?
I try to be understood, in my double hours, the secrets in my screens, but I’m
surveyed, surveyed, surveyed.
Maybe it’s the call of the void that reminds me I’m alive.
My Box
I know it’s hard to open up. I’m not having trouble saying words that explain the thing but the thing is a box that encases the feeling which is what I’m stumbling trying to find the key to. My box is wearing a blazer with the tag still on to the bar at night. My box is turning the flea market to find a sign on US 78. My box is a board game half finished and pushed into a corner. My box is a lime kept by my salt lamp to balance the boredom. My box is seven pillows to squish my hollow body. My box is a twenty dollar bag of cat food because she deserves better than me. My box is one earring because I won’t lose two. My box is desperate interviews. My box is not what I’m willing to do. My box is the echo of a metaphor for another me. My box separates me from love, love that is happening for me. The feeling in the box is the realization I don’t quite remember. The feeling in the box is how I feel when I talk to Stuart. The feeling in the box is falling onto a bed with Lorenzo in Morocco. The feeling in the box is catching a 5 and moving. The feeling in the box is Warschauer Bruecke and knowing loneliness is imminent but not crying because the world is your crib. The feeling I want to share when I’m with you. The end of May and beginning of June.
Dragging your imagination like a curtain
It’s so hard to try to experience anything objectively. There’s this insistent paranoia that makes you believe – in spite of your disbelief in the whole ordeal – that you are being played, conned, and manipulated by the institution and other people’s decisions. The excess equal to the display and the excess of the display is what touches me, and the art becomes the portal. To which it was not that for me before, before it was an experience. The objectivity of the art itself, is penetrating my body And so I don’t know if I feel sorry for, or jealous of, the aura preserved forever. The only thing that can only be felt, but never touched.
Chiron
There is no decline
In my love, throughout surges of pain.
After all, a body
Can not fully exist in 360 vision.
If sights do control
If minds only see
I wish you not a responsibility to feel me.
But if attention is paired with pain
And your finger in my wound could
Point to where it hurts. I’d agree;
I’m not broken, I’m alive.
Feigning Feigning Feigning Feigning Intimacy
You are more than what I touch
As is this desire
Stronger than what hurts.
A body in pain is exposing stone
I bear my fruit, I need not be replanted.
But should illness inflict upon my roots and
Tremors do appear
Save what is good
Begin again to tend to what is bound to grow
And perform rites upon that which hath
Lost so instead.
For the tree in me a seed I’ll be.
Not stricken so yet by the sun
Rather soaking in the moistness
Of a thousand deaths a thousand lives
Focused, not to hypnotize, but to wait
In the patient arms of a hunger that knows
It is not the body that is its bait.
Petrichor.
I wander, thru my window
Along the ripped edge of civility
I test my humanity before I trespass
Barefoot.
In quest of, this chemical comedy:
A REACTION – ON CONTACT
The Scent of the Memory of Death
Of course, the asphalt and lime simmers
And I smell not the Earth, but a cunning
Which cures me.
We breathe in this feeling made of air
And the glory of a mid-June downpour
And I
. Listen
To the sensual echo of the Earth curling in.
What dictates the mass of a raindrop?
Its speed and weight
Or how beautiful it seems to me
On any given day.
[untitled]
It takes a day to memorialize a building
Takes a year to pave a road
Picture in a second
Forever to be sold
Eternity of imagination
A lifetime never seen.
Wisdom is timely
The symptoms pass before you believe.
The golden filibuster’s trajectory laments patented ideas
Inescapable daily repeated virtual mood awards
Founders validate elections and the list goes unseen.
Names of men we all possess.
Nonchalance as power
What omnipotent authority have you provided detached from the numbers?
When I’m not doing my laundry
I’m waiting for the days to grow into a nest of familiar wonder
There are textures received in the untanglement
Polka dots clinging to the fabric of warmer ones
I let all the private things get too close
To what I always touch
Weak buttons
Pieces hand-washed
I prefer not to keep watch
As my value doubles up
And the list goes on and on
We the People who I let evade my belief in myself
The little devils I hire to tempt my pious ass
With sexual awakening and dual citizenship
Loads of it
I’m talking about real Gold here, people
Enough to make you jump out of your toilet bowl and use the stratosphere as a chaser.
My only fear is that sooner or later
My heart will grow accustomed to the taste of your skin
Confidence grows
It sounds like records scratching
Strict beats and pressure track my inclination to tap the next, sir
I wish that
some one – some one
Were attuned to my sooner or later thirst trap.
I pontificate the admirable churning of my gut as normal.
why is it that sex makes everything red?
I lose my vision when I remember things, eyes rolling back in a memory.
Noses six inches close, still, we close holes, distance within your six inches.
And that’s the funny thing –
It’s unnecessary.
I practically beg to become a huge eyeball!
Seeing the foreseen, previously known we,
Balled up.
And Categorized with the forgotten outerwear.
There is no feeling(s)
We subsist off of being, on.
hands, talking, sleeping.
I wish that
Someone would just bump this already.
If there is no romance, I will eat.
And from there, clouds begin to curdle.
My mother’s mold festering in the corners of my bedrooms.
Severed man-hands grabbing out of bags – not hand bags
On the floor of my girlhood, would
Vomit from hands in gesso on the wood
Floor.
Why do they call drowning in yourself consumption?
There can’t possibly be a displeasing way to be eaten.
By death I inch forth, teething bite and nail.
What they mean is: truth must have room for emptiness.
Greed pushes out truth;
And I am suffering
Here, in the post-McDonald’s clarity.
My terror.
Is it greed
That pushes me away
Is it me that goes
If I wasn’t being consumed by all that isn’t,
I would be making something new.
Stitching a safety net out of blue.
I would know how to make the room dark for the length of an exposure
or how to mix
emulsion
or remember how to sing for sure.
January sixth or January 6th
With one integer on the clock, I stare past the white wall of the year, back
against the iron lamppost of time.
January sixth or January 6th: sounds like a cold day. Now soldiers sleep in
marble floored corridors while everyone hides in their homes. This is what
I see on the outside.
A collective mind does not mean much of nothing, so long as this collective
does not have the choreography of process to perceive of itself.
I am embarrassed by myself. In the pinky, gossamer folds of my mind, let’s
call this region “The Plaquemines of Mischief”, one such troll is making me
laugh too loud alone in my room. The embarrassment lingers like a familiar
glamoured as this dazed feeling that hovers like heartburn and probably is
heartburn. My Hips!
Take into account my body.
Despite that, I know I am 2 am part hydraulic, part triggered. Spewing out
– you guessed it – fluids.
But all of these immediately futile responses tend toward failure simply
because they assume one rational condition of being or another, like
presence or…
Is it so bad to assume?
Obviously the answer for everything doesn’t need to be brought to its
logical opposite extremes – but, it’s nice to think about.
How difficult to find the time to say the truth.
Perhaps that’s why I can’t admit the question just doesn’t seem worth it to
answer or otherwise.
Gabriella Andino is a writer, dancer, and dreamer of radical futurities. As an art historian in practice, they focus on clarifying histories through embodiment, remediation, and archival research. Gabriella currently lives in Bulbancha, AKA New Orleans, LA by way of Athens, GA; where they received a BA in Art History from the University of Georgia. http://www.gabriellandino.com