Prageeta Sharma

more so than we did before, but now we know what to do with them. We hang our troubles on them and wipe our shoes against them. We go lethargic on the porch, we tear the bark with spindly fingers. We soak up the sun with restless hunger. So much sky we say in unison, where does it go, do we follow it? Do we let it get away? For months we splay without a fence, door wide open— blue and brash inside and out.Because we can, we keep saying,because we can. We face a lush sense of life that we have nothing to do with. We face our cravings and journey with a new kind, our new people; They all possess smiles and frowns, but more windswept expressions—no permanent downwardness of spirit, the way it was back east. And since we've left the city to be ourselves, we still must face our needy souls— full of want, compulsions. Were we proud of this? The way we turned away? But we've protected these habits, forgone others in return. What is the profession of the culture-hoarder? Who are the gatekeepers? Do we grace them with our backs? Moreover our chests remain empty yet seductively warmed, burning by the fire, our asses cold and exposed. All the wood, crisp birch to shield our lazy lobes, rounded bodies, our cerebrums and other parts. Are we awaiting cheerless ambivalence to greet us in the West? Cavernous and cloudless, unaffected by beauty. Let's be petulant, this is us now, we say. We can't help but find ourselves lustful; crying alligator tears with pails to our eyes,we didn't know we were here we kept saying,we don't know how it happened. We thought and thought, and finally we closed our doors on the trees to hide what we grew temperate for but resolve didn't find us, not alive with force,we flew out of their arms.

I’ve been sad and can’t find a seasonal sequence. I go forward then my order reverses and it’s winter again two years ago, with that sticky ice that lost your footing as you gripped that container of Greek yogurt you brought to the doctor’s, even when you couldn’t speak; you only darted your eyes with a fear that continually registered in your pupil size. You clutched your sets of things. I am full of what are sets of things I know well then I go backwards and I don’t have any sets of things. I see your pink-stained washcloth from your wool coat. Your cerebellum tumor is inside with your other tumors but I don’t know it’s there yet neither do you. It appeared and controlled your brain and the things you couldn’t hold. I wonder what things really are, if they are just a set of symbols we sequence and then find purposeful. I wonder if they are like rituals that we learn for our brain. We have those for our body and those for our brain. I look at you — you are alive — and you breathe labored breaths then you died. There, in the hospital bed, when I let time lapse not knowing how to hold you. I let you die for seven days. Your daughter, bigger than I am, could hold you. She could use her muscles to grip you, but I couldn’t hold you, even though you lost forty pounds your last month. I couldn’t find the sequence because I reversed everything into its pain cycle and you didn’t want me to watch you die but I couldn’t understand how everyone could let it happen and I could too, but only if I could let it fall into its hole, its awkward sequence, around death; it’s not awkward it’s just not right. I could make as many intuitive decisions, and many logical sequences occurred around your treatments, but I didn’t know you were stepping out of sequence, and treatments are not producing remedies, and I left myself at the side of the hospital bed. You were in another light, exiting slowly. I thought the sequence of grieving would banish all the anxiety but it came back this year. I became debilitated. I have a debilitating anxiety that I thought was gone. 
I have too many anxious sequences now and they are blurring meaning. They are blurring my truths like time-lapses and I don’t rush to find the joy of the occurrence without looking for the traps, and my logic, and my stumbling out into another bed that places me in this now-future and you don’t see me because you are no longer alive with me and I can’t rectify this sequence. And I worry that when I love him he will die too. I can’t happen into its learning like it’s wisdom. It’s still deeply unconscious to hold this fear after I banished worry because I looked it in the eyes and it was real and I felt I knew what it looked like. It’s the unknowing learning that I was deeply afraid to imagine and yet it’s your empty bed, your empty closet, you’re empty of the spirited you that gave you to me, in that human way we come to rely upon and that shames us so. And every night of this thinking is a long night of this thinking. Do you fall into bed with us, and I have no idea of this? I’d love to think it’s so, and we have room for your sets of things.

It was not a romantic sentiment, nor self-determined; rather, it was embarrassing. My love of spearheading, from introvert to extrovert, from cowardice to consequence, from the enjambment to the unspecified dunce. It was a sabotage, a reckless moment: a purulent, tawny decree. All temptation puzzled me and drew me in. I dropped out of a large life, I flew over exams, I punched out breakfast teachers with lunch money, toiling over the idea of belonging rather than over upward mobility. I understood how power flung outward into the troves of the cursed (I felt cursed or troubled all of the time). I wasn't bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons. All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by an outside force was something to be freely ignored. I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation. The fog felt like an aphorism. Never lifting, always dull, always an added pull. The tribunal cloud judged below, judged my direction. There was lying, conning, faking, elucidating in order to get away with undoing. I was interested in preserving yet I can't tell you if it felt sacred or befallen. Your anxiety might have represented a crushing faith or a character assassination, my own or someone else's. Or a lack of grip on reality: the wet rip of the grocery bags all of it falling— your body on all fours. Accumulating soot upon retrieval. There were downsides to feeling different so I huddled in the corner (not a ball, not rocking). I felt friendless and yet social. I felt no aptitude towards refining a skill. However, words cut my brain into two brains with their precipice their demarcations, their incisions (too strong a word). They held me captive against their edge, their influence: I felt like insinuating something delicate or dear. Now—I am holding on—trying to pay attention to the collusion that I must be playing over and over in my mind, and it was my mind, it needed me to leave everything outside, on the steps or in the sky, to feign exhaustion in order to meet an aberration, the one in the corner that felt large and carefree with its own vernacular sprawled with whitewash on bricks or floors or that ghastly far above that kept me standing very still but perhaps I wasn't inactive, I was just interpreting what had already been an assumed boundary, immersed in its insularity and in what stuck to its roundedness. for Katy Lederer

After being humiliated one continues the manuscript of identity. Activities, diseases, doldrums, the crony affair after the situation, the one where one faces how one is the undertaste, how one isn't the neighbor, the piebaker, a white folk. How one isn't a gorgeous dream wrapped up in tireless affection, primped for wider screens. So there one grew, in the coffee sickness, the dictionary browsing in a fury for the word entitlement to spill— After convulsing with rage, one continues in the aftermath of no friends on Tuesdays or shouting fiercely when nothing sobered to the eleventh hour and the tide shrunk to its sense of privacy where it had nothing to do with shores or moons, and humiliation sat on its lover's knee, greeting the eccentric rich and the hourglass with such force the rage enameled like fine paint to a sheen of deep blue. Restless in the way that stirs the crowd to its feet to claim the encounter for the intentions of personal gain without the empire, without the embarrassment of shaking one's head, of resting it underneath the ground, to live sanctioned in the migrancy with an ugly plate for the economy but working ever so hard. So unplanned, so beyond what one did before the lack of dignity sang an opera. And organized all the ideas, before rage shot a bird that had once watched effortlessly all the comings and goings.

for Adam And I didn't see that now you were here on the page writing poems too: poems silken with blue, fortified with a metaphor passing through. But I knew this speaker was you and knew there was so much about you that could reach around the metaphor to a personal etymology, one that could brighten and darken the poem without too many over-determined moves. But if you, speaker, need figures—more than language— who bless the poem's grief with vantage points or an altitude high up, or bandages soaked in vinegar, sure, then let the speaker invent a mirage, I understand that, too. It's tough these days when anxiety speaks through the fission of thought; it's the piss-pot of the mind. What anchors the fisted pronoun "we" in your poem? Something must. And another thing, upon second read, only now do I see how the "you" and "I" of someone else's poem landed in yours: on that particular cited greenery. And these other pronouns know—ahead of time- to check the soles of their shoes and how to manage a homonym's feet; moreover, they told you, speaker, how to open and shut the door without too much invention or conviction, which in a poem is rare.

I thought he was over-medicating himself and planning his suicide. I took the pills away from him. He looked defeated. He said as much. I felt sorry for both of us. His expressions held this enormity and a seared-exhausted center. Spatial discomfort started to affect him but didn't take hold till the next day, when he started to lose consciousness and rattled the house yelling about thieves, robbers, drunks, and pill-snatchers.  We didn’t know what was going on: the tumor was rapidly metastasizing its mass through his cerebellum. His body became harder to manage and he sprung through the house with fear tugging violently at his bile duct tube. Aja and I camped in the front rooms. The last night of intimacy, of lucidity—unbeknownst to me—we sat together huddled and I caressed him, cradling his arms, his legs, and his penis. I was sure we had time left for more, but this was the last time he spoke and searched my face and looked at me with a recognition I understood. It’s how we moved out of consciousness. I am haunted by those last days before we succumbed to hospice. I remember how stunning he was resting in bed—that week before, in our library with a cornflower blue-sheeted bed made by Ashby and Spider. In that bed, he had a look of wonder when we put movies on—he excited over Wilson, the ball in Castaway and stared unblinkingly at Tom Hanks. We giggled over this, and appreciated how Andrew put the Eno station on next, and Aja lit and framed this sheeted bed with a twinkling lamp, an illuminant: bulbs he found soothing. We all watched him compose in the air to Philip Glass. I wished that we could have unleashed him to his afterlife then. That's what he would have wanted: a release to his own universe sonant and material, an ethereal ball. An awkward Tom Hanks, a Wilson, and a castaway in a glittering hand-printed sea. This death sequence was the one I wanted for him.

after Laura Riding Jackson There's a structure for idiocy—lamplight— all over the nation; it's an illumination with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius. I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways—their lightbulbs— as righteous forms of complexity; not calculated obfuscations. Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing the most important seer of light. Am I providing this luxury as well? Or is this my radical assertion in order to call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like? (That's my problem with the poem these days.) (The light in my office flickers on and off—the lamp is broken.) I see no enlightenment here, much like I see my acquaintances: bright lights and night lights. The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's: It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.

It was just a momentary untruth in my way, bodies of the crowd blocked the big blue outside. Now I have a stealthy cause: to try and be myself, to further a personal idea of arrangement, of how to use those thoughts, the ones that don't get used. But how to let them tick without abuse. How to repay the debt, use the solvent, blast the botched & troubled nearby— What does everyone else caress? All those etched poses neatly joined: Mastery, hierarchy, witchcraft & shamanism. A spike in the dander keeps me plain enough— but to insist! To consolidate those fears—after months of uncertainty couldn't cough or breathe or pilfer correctly. Now this victorious shape, this idea moves through muteness, shyness, weakness— then it awakens: Becomes a nonconformist happenstance— A person saddled beneath Reaches up for a fiction, abundant and unrestricted ideas poised and in front.