Repetition Nineteen. Mónica de la Torre
don’t say “spread the word.” Pasa la voz is our idiom, easily
mistaken for a fleeting voice. From the back row all I see is fingers
gliding in sync with her vocalizations. How fitting a last name
like halo. Lucky for us here time is measure and inexplicable
substance. That’s when I decide to stop fighting the city. Use it in my
favor. Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.
La sottise
It dawned on me, the other day, at the launch
of a former colleague’s book, that if I ever
was a funny poet, I no longer was one.
I’d picked something amusing to read since
the party would be at a bar, and people wouldn’t
want to stay still and listen to us drone on
but instead would be there to drink and celebrate
their friend’s accomplishment, no matter what
they actually thought of his poems; they
were good poems, don’t get me wrong. Alright,
they were somewhat sincere, a bit saccharine,
but that’s beside the point, and, anyway, who cares.
During my reading no one chuckled loud enough
to let me know that my humor had landed.
Granted, it was subtle. My poem had to do
with the people you encounter in hotels when,
if you think about it, you’re doing some of the most
intimate things you could possibly do, except
die, in the company of strangers, always
perfect. As I was saying, I was up on stage,
and couldn’t see anyone. The mic was too big, right
in my face, and when I read in settings like these
all I hear is the distortion of my amplified
voice, which makes me jumble lines and garble
words I have no difficulty pronouncing otherwise.
Automobile, for example, which I can say easily
in Spanish and from now on will always be vehicle.
I was done and the crowd applauded, sort of.
It was the next poet’s turn and everyone around me
started cheering and slapping their thighs,
and then the next poet went up, and told
hysterical jokes about Trump and Ted Cruz
as he read poems that were even wittier.
Everyone was in stitches. That’s when it dawned
on me that perhaps I’m not funny anymore, but what
the hell, how’s that the marker of a work’s ability
to move its audience, I mean, what if Emily Dickinson
were at an open mic delivering the poem about feeling
like a nobody talking to other nobodies and everyone
cracked up, or what if it was Baudelaire,
for that matter, who had to pause up there while reading
the sonnet about nature being a temple sending people
mixed messages, because of the audience’s hoots,
or better yet, imagine Catullus, reluctantly playing
to the crowd with his I love my hate and hate my love.
Why? you ask. All I know is the feeling’s back
again, and it torments me. But, wait, let’s circle back
to Baudelaire. What if he called out the phonies
at a gig and people misheard and exploded
with laughter, thinking he’d said funnies even after
he doubled down and said he wasn’t kidding.
Error Is Boundless
We tried using tally marks instead, for seeming more
discrete. While adding them up one of us kept texting the other
one of us, sending photos of bright green cakes with rings
of pink icing on their edges and trios of blue flowers
adorning their tops. Single-digit price tags sticking out
from toothpicks, as if for birthdays pre-nineteen ninety nine.
Soon it got challenging to keep count while referring to each
number as a number that is one more than the previous number,
indefinitely. A lemon-yellow cake appeared onscreen and it became
evident progression would only lead back to the beginning.
One is a version of unus, oinos. In other words, listen to us.
Two mirrors tú, and also. When a single unit is no longer the case,
one becomes reciprocal, a second person. At the end of you
and me, three becomes expected, except when misread.
Thríe or threo, gender dependent. God, a prisoner or king,
laughing away. What to make of the thief in fif, of oil lamps
especially, as in quinqués, and pent up. I skipped four.
Quattuor, squatter, since four is for all when being walled off.
Time stamp: 4 pm. I meant not to demonstrate but to delve
into the full expression of the form, yet it kept emptying
out, becoming non-tiered.
Interjet 2996
“Había una vaz…” is how most fairy tales begin in Spanish. It’s somewhere between the English equivalents “Once upon a time…” and “There was once….” You wouldn’t use it as an opener for a casual anecdote, since it instantly indicates to the reader or listener that the account to follow is fictional. Yet it does so without heightening the language as much as “upon” does in the English phrase, where a subtle literary flourish places the narrative squarely within fantasy, outside of ordinary time.
And so one time I was flying back to JFK from Mexico City—whose pair of synonymous names, by official decree and a mighty branding effort, had been reduced to one since I’d last spent an extended period of time there. As of January 29, 2016, the city would be referred to as Ciudad de México only. DF was no longer. On billboards, buses, and all over the streets there was signage to remind its inhabitants of the megalopolis’s catchier social-media era moniker: CDMX. The city is now recognized as its own entity, and has its own governor. CDMX as an acronym might look good, but it is impossible to pronounce or swerve into vernacular. Its vowels don’t snap together the way DF’s do,