If in a Language

I'd worn a carving to the party, but no one had noticed.
There were, in every room, some instruments that made no sound.
Everything, made out of matter.
I was at all times a modern object.

A river slitting the city;
an insurgency of the kitchen table;
an arrangement in the name of derangement;
the identified drone of a drone.

The object was zippered, red and gothic; a cement mixer made out of teeth.
An army of carvers had come to take back what art had been extracted from them.
None of them named, the artisans claimed that the artwork was theirs.
Where was the spring of the origin’s source?

The stripped native forest;
The felling of the buttressed trunks;
The razing and the artist;
A palm plantation that spelled SOS in the eye of the drone.


The tree proffered the blueprint for non-toxic varnish.
A plan for the music, an image made after my body.
Well, the instrument's eye was looking at I while I cried.
And it was all bathed in a note.

ITERATION

or the important thing is time.
Handshakes and conflicts,
including genders and ramps
from the future and all other times, as well.
Naturally, between and unseeing,
I went through all the numbers’ centers:
arms, mouths, leg; smoke in and out.
No need for paradigmatic
gymnastics. Dramatic. Now,
the Amazon has burned out,
there is five of everything.
The compact elements adorning
the plenum, complaining
in heterogenous fashion of infection.

ITERATION

Items were there and removed
without ever leaving me.
When I was talking to talk,
I made some nice adjustments.  
Long-term changes are mechanical.
Sex has been infected with the gods.
In fact, it is very much far
and away at all times.
In every new being, in the past.
Turns out, all this was wrong.
The day is almost over.
Me! I am tired.
I awoke in a glacier,
which I could feel was hungry for my body.

ITERATION

Cool data streams were happening
to everything and everything
beneath it. I found it ecstatic
and terrifying. The borders were lubed
and of course, the economy,
running at peak.
At each rebellion, a narrow memory
floundered and drowned. The dog,
the tea, the studio. The tree house, 
the stone house, the straw house:
each has lost its value indefinitely
and all construction is dangerous.
They sang the song, leaning forward
by means of classic machines.

ITERATION

Different awakening nations
familiarizing themselves
with a large wheel of materials, worn
into a great quilt of need. I want to go nowhere,
but no one would show me the way.
Things have grown a lot,
increasing every minute
and flowing from time to time.
I can do nothing about the lawn. 
But it doesn’t worry me, really.
I’m ready to fuck
and I know that I shall. 
Of course, my heart is little tight again,
and my body, resting on property.

ITERATION

Self-loosened and set aside,
the database is crumbling.
This is no hands-on experiment.
The start was laughing at it,
my present company a pretty gnat
and my dear self.
Nothing could satisfy
my desire for non-derivative
possibility. But I will come
soon. Yes, everything
has been changed to something
in sight of wealth and travel.
Unknown is the state
of the subject.

ITERATION

Medium-long, long, and very long;
middle-world stages are over.
At my office, dry and bitter,
a demo on construction work.
I had already chosen my body.
It was wet for my wetness.
All the body I could handle, 
beside myself at noon,
tho I may have been just
a puff above my blue belly.
Glorious wounds, put me on the table,
put me with the rust of dandelions,
the bird cast out on either side of song.
Every summer, the same song.

ITERATION

They finish each song one by one:
Panopolis, vegetable oil, local affairs.
If they are hungry, all materials
on the original source are copied.
Is it fun? Under invisible lids.
Is it the same? A consciousness
from birth, from existence and existing
conditions. I was pretty good
when I was put into the world
all at once. This whole thing,
it awakens my secret fault.
Rough lightning, the box I was in.
Profligate and flaze: it was me,
it was me and my body.



Tracy Fuad is the author of about:blank, selected by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. She is a 2021-22 Poetry Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and lives in Berlin, where she teaches at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.