K. Lorraine Graham

From In The Non-Dream World

I love the messy start of love, too, the dopamine hits, the sweet swoon
of whatever love is. More than a decade ago I drove the car to Chula Vista
for tacos and came back via Silver Strand State Beach. Today’s new moon
has me daydreaming about collective endeavors and rage, but I resist a
full plan. I sent texts and photos from the beach, sharing my mini adventure.
The light was sharp and blue, shorthand for an early spring late afternoon
in Southern California. All my maternal ancestors haunt this memory, I venture
that they empathize. A friend texts to say he’s changed his mind about
something important. He misses the swoon, doesn’t want to be alone.
Trevor texts to say that what he thought was a can of tomatoes is really
a can of fire roasted tomatoes with green chilis and do I think the bebés
will notice? I found out my partner was cheating on me by trying to fix
their phone and seeing text messages from their lover. Sweet
swoon and the midlife crises of men, the tyranny of the unimaginative.
Even before Trump’s proclamations of halting Federal grants the Democrats
were texting me daily about the downfall of America. The situation is dire,
send $15. I spent a lot of time crying or screaming in the car on the 405,
driving home in hard-core traffic. My father failed to pick us up in the Aukland,
New Zealand airport then left us there as quickly as possible, post-divorce
announcement. Trevor opens the can of tomatoes and there are charred
black bits --no way the kids will eat it in a sauce. On the one hand,
I don’t want to think, and on the other it’s all I can do. Think, move my body,
speak a word. Cry--both in the present and the past. I call my mother,
say, “The heat’s broken and it’s 15 degrees outside.” In America you cannot
count on the heat to work in your child’s school, can’t count on the water.
You can count on the chimerical promise of bootstrapping and a bunch of legal
hearsay rules. I mean I haven’t actually experienced the school’s crummy
heating system directly. “What do you know in your bones?” asks my therapist.
Nothing, not anymore. My anxiety is more like a low-grade urge to run combined with desire
to sleep all day and drink for at least part of the night. The way waking
up from a nap in daylight is luxurious and disorienting. What conspires
against me is nothing. No one has time for a hex. What kind of perspective-taking
does partnership require? I get an EZDriveMA alert saying that my vehicle
has an unpaid toll bill. Amazon wants me to buy a hose splitter on sale. I drove
through Massachusetts last year on the way to my cousin’s funeral. What meaningful
advice does the poem have for grief and betrayal, which is to say it’s interwoven
with human experience, and I’d better get it together. The pronouns in that sentence
don’t work, but this isn’t the first time I’ve wanted a new grammar or a line that acts
like a river and all the past, present and future paths of that river, i.e. the challenge is time, repentance,
and space. I wrote a poem that unraveled the language of partnership through the language of contracts
and it was funny at the time. I’ve ordered sweet-pea seeds since they’re good for sowing
in January, and maybe I’ll sow some outside under the snow and sing to them daily
like I sing to my children each night who don’t listen but notice when I forgow
any part of the bedtime routine. And so I sing. I imagined gaily strumming my ukulele
for them but it’s just me acapella. Ken says no desire is useless, so what does the nap
have to say to the partnership, to me? Lay the fuck down and dream, poet, stop staring
out the window and hallucinating your own death or writhing with anxiety. Recap:
No one has time for a hex, this is just you being a human. Sweetheart, get your bearings.
My friend wonders if they’re giving in by changing their mind. I worry that the hot
sex I had last night means I can’t still be angry. This is like
wanting to run, fleeing the scene but planning to be rehabbed
for miswanting, then haunting the scene ever after. I let calls
go straight to voicemail. I know you remember answering
machines, how a bitch could go on and on knowing that someone
might be listening and still pick up. Plus I’m factoring in the possibility
of just giving up, but giving up on a loved one isn’t something I know how to do,
though I’m ok with giving up in general: Let go of the rock face, sink
into that flaming dagger and swoon. The problem is when relinquishing
is just a way of getting fucked up, though knives and cliffs aren’t win-win
situations, and that full moon was a bit much. Notice I want to jump
out the window or casually step in front of a bus. That’s my go-to death
fantasy. A supernova would be dramatic, but the only people who could witness
and remember it are already dead, and I don’t know what the dead
witness. My tendency towards silence is becoming a habit,
so what is the shape of silence and the shape of my body in silence
on a mid-January Sunday, sleet-covered streets and winter vortex
in the forecast. I look out the window, my body in the way of looking
out the window. I mean I impede my own actions, and this distraction
is behind the act of looking out the window. I’m not worried
about the weather or the doorsteps getting icy. Let it be no detraction
from my merits to say I am plain spoken and unhurried,
have nothing to say that isn’t in this poem. Desmond’s ruining
his playdate, screaming, “No one wants to play with me.”
and this is how the afternoon begins, me feeling like a shoo in
for worst and most maudlin mother ever. My friend wants to talk,
but I’m in a meeting, so we make a plan for later in the evening.
I need to walk alone along some half-forgotten coast. A jay squawks,
a starling mumbles, and I settle for perambulating around northeast D.C.
We almost went to the Hirshhorn Museum on inauguration day before remembering
it was probably a bad idea to go downtown. Yesterday in therapy I elucidated
errors, cozy under a blanket. I was all adrenaline, improbably calm
while the therapist made therapist-shaped sentences punctuated
with words like “fascination,” “addiction,” and “relationship.” I call Mom and say
nothing’s off the phenomenological table, climb under the weighted blanket
Trevor got for me one Christmas, not as good a feeling as having
his body on top of mine but good enough for a Wednesday afternoon
where nothing like that is happening, just dirty snow and surpassingly low temperatures.

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