the specimen's apology
Playlist by George AbrahamIn the specimen’s apology George Abraham writes with a sharp elegance about lineage, about inheritance, about what gets passed down, and what doesn’t. What’s erased. What’s obscured. What’s locked away. I get the sense of Rubik’s Cube-ing, searching for the right sequence of words or images or structures to make sense of absence, and in doing so, he makes a beautiful, furious, and crackling new kind of sense. His writing smacks my feelings right across the face. — Tommy Pico
memory study with specimen in dark universe
in the beginning, there wasthe body. a you, finite enoughto reside, compact, in the confinesof space & time –
but before there wasa you, there was the empty. that resides strongin the body. a longing. a definition – can the bodyexist without the Loneliness it counters
& inhabits –
yes – the Loneliness grew strong withinyou. made a world of you, dark& vast as the beast that guards it;became a copper-lunged thing;a thing that sings without breathing,strips the music from your littlebones; winged beast of metallicclaw & its anthem of shredding wire:all the delicate machinery builtto contain you –but in this reality, you are tame& young. small. hollow-boned, yet shatterproof in allyour body’s oblivious histories.you cannot know the way you split galaxieswith a single breath; the universesyour hands can unlock in a single strike –your history, a petty matchbox that igniteswith friction & hands, always the hands;you are oblivious of the scientistsbehind the screens, who claimthey built you; observing the specimenof you – who built a tower in you,the Lonely that makes you retreatinto yourself; who wrote the booksyou could never find yourself in; booksthat claim they saved you & built allthe delicate machinery & wingedbeasts that strip you of flight & sweetentropy; wingless child – the body is an infinity you have yet to unravel –
maqam of moonlight, for the wandering
to be read from right to left, after Marwa Helala ask to - blood of conjuring a is desire of know i what& sweat its in humid listless it was or me of nation tired- deviance quantum & stochasticity own its in lost : entropycarries it blood the hence & design its through thing a name to learned wetype what - is it night of type what on depending to or - on preys &carries air the humid heavy of relics fragile before you like men ruined i’ve ,yescount body my marked i catacomb brief a chest themselves oflose never beast this lest erosion refusing scar it let & nails brittle withmade he caverns the forget or ,marrow of dry sucked bones of countendless & unexplored perimeters its in even yes : flight refusing skeletons ofplanet this heart sweet reach beyond stratosphere or body as- us of both the for claustrophobic too is
from memory study, in fragmented reality
in this reality, the story unwrites itself:my lover un-ghosts me after i swallowconfession; the word bisexual unmakesitself at home in me & i do not leavemy house; the clear liquid runs backinto its bottle like a river might; my motheris not yet a mountain: the avalanche sweepsup her body, unlearning & inhaling its anxieties;she’s a good girl, a good southern girl:the future grandchildren of my mother’s sentencesretreat to a hypothetical womb; her blessing, notformed, hangs heavy in the thick air; my queerness& self-loathing unwind, like DNA strands –
*what of the body isn’tan unbecoming –*
i uncork a bottle of liquid galaxies& tonight i am my mother’s child;a boy i find pretty presses his tongueagainst my front teeth & i forgetmyself; i later findmy self alone beneaththe star light & thisis not the reality wherethe boy loves himself back, nor is ita story where the boy needn’t hatehimself to be worthy of touch –
*
tonight i am a thousand miles north& i do not call my mother. i do notsmell the ethanol through her phone-static; i do not hear the same apologyunwinding itself from her breathlike collapsing rosary beads; like allahyerhama whispered at a wake; but i dohear her say i love you, you have to knowi love you. & is that not its own funeralquiet? her hands, kissing the bottle’s rimsubmerging in the absence –
*
say the sun forgave itself the inevitabledisappearance; say the ocean forgavethe moonlight’s lonesome pull –say the fluid forgave its captor, history –& even that can be its own shelter;maybe in that reality, i would be,instead, child of Thales: descendentof salt & molecule; everything i touch,spiraling into a galaxy of droplets, dissolving –
ars poetica with parallel dimensions
i must confess, this softness is often an endlesswell i fall into, the way a snake chases itself intoitself. on tamer days
i blame the fruit for their thick
ripening & not the small jealousies
endangeringthe honeybee; some days i cannot distinguishdesire from extinction – every love of mine demands blood-shed of a hunter
’s lineage; o exile my exile, that i could
unbloody our laced talons
& write them into metal
wings; that we could un-cauterize the crimson
sky & fly
into a sunset spilling blood that is not our own –that i could turn
2 mirrors in on themselves,unraveling those infinite & countable dimensions: somewhere, i pluck an apple & a parallel self suffers the expulsion, itself ancestry rippling across space, itself timeless; in this reality, i lose a country, for another Eden to blossom beneath a more forgiving stratosphere;
deem me; my disposition
i fang so hard it louds my smile, writes my cyanide
ducts into gentle rain; in truth,
the way infinity plus infinity is just infinity; forever
fails us
child’s fist
(of being); because i love him, he is everyone’s