Poems | Jaime Garcia

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1. Tricks For Surviving Martial Law

It's like making deals with a god you don't believe in.
And then it's Oh fuck I died in my sleep and the word field as in radar
as in the paper garden in her hair as in her yellow hair
weightless and writhing in a lake.

Then the onslaught of press releases promising a calm and a quiet in the radius,
'Beginning a self-portrait by painting all the people you're not is irrational',
it says 'Shhh we're waiting for you to touch yourself,'
it says stop resisting, it says go back to sleep and dream the t.v. psychic and the white hail
annexing your wild deserts.

The exit plan for depopulating the landscape is that enough near-death
and you become like the weather, strange and illegal,
all bright foil garbage shining in the hills,
all brutal afterimage of the commercial aircraft
weaponized through its disappearance.

No matter what,
there was something beautiful here
and the evidence of this is your standing army. This is what you fight with.



2. United Fruit Company

Every orchard you spread, every sudden jolt in your system,
the furniture of your body quaking like pigeons
in the other room. How we struggle in the drought,
how the rain never reaches this valley.

And sometimes there are so many hands in my thoughts,
the graffiti in drift the slope stirring a skyline of your porcelain,
piles of clothes, wrecked and erect,
a bare tree reach against the window,
the palmed sun in you smiling and writhing across someone's sheets.

And sometimes come the shadow in stampede, see: wild Chernobyl,
the way you build yourself in my absence
toward the bluing lakes; our condition: Weather,
wandering and hungry, the arc v. arch v. ark-
glowing and floating island in the x-ray.

What you must already understand: The ache we feel
is fatalistic and voyeuristic and animalistic,
the dream is real and surreal
and there is no difference,

the exodus is internal
and constant.


3. Luanne Platter Accidentally Joins a Cult

It's the reptilians, our hyper-evolved secret police. Skeeter Davis tells me to assassinate myself before things get out hand, to make a fuss with newspaper across the hotel floor because Get it everything is a fucking cage. Ergo the word thorax and its recent popularity in modern media and poetry; civil responsibility: To subliminally love your monstrous invisibles. Oh baptism. Oh not-for-profit infomercials featuring fucked up soldiers with altered brains, hobbling around like a constant counter-argument for the theory of the existence of the soul. Skeeter Davis says to me about the mechanism behind moving on, my closing pyramid, don't they fucking know? And I mean yeah sure every crisis is proximate to what you've bombed before. I am a permanent resident of that boiling throat. The hologram sky tends to identify not by name but by taste and smell; you roll into the scene along a storyboard dimension, an old west storm, the copper gown sitting on your tongue, 2-D shadows barreling like a cartoon natural disaster in the gut of a native american extra, architecture stolen from the failed spanish salvation, and you sit there waiting for someone to invent a lake and narrate some trees. But everything is stacked and defiant; there is one crisis where you suddenly suspect you don't exist and another where you suddenly realize you do. I would be a bad omen except that by definition isn't every birth a bad omen? I mean how many outcomes could there possibly be? A quiet death, a violent one? My cynicism is a rifle and my rifles are dicks. And that means I will miss my mother so much when she dies that I will want to die too. Remove your passage from my book, remove your rocky mountains from my passage; Dear secret reptilian government, I hoaxed your presence and came with the women you plagiarized from your made-up cafes. I too am proximate, like a corpse. Skeeter Davis is telling me the world is ending and I imagine you, 1960's, vodka in a glass, unfiltered cigarettes bobbing around the quiet dark like torches in chauvet, writing haunting subliminal music for the inevitable descent into wherever the fuck we are going.