Atopia. Sandra Simonds

      Atopia

      When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air—

      So what is there

      to be afraid of?

      A cage of air. Baudelaire said

      Poe thought America was one giant cage.

      To the poet, a nation is one big cage.

      And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?

      Try to put a cage around your dream.

      The cage escapes the dream.

      I see it streak and stream.

      Night is the insane asylum of plants—Raúl Zurita

      Everyone dreams of the apocalypse, they are barfing

      into their grief but I, love, dream of you, and I am old enough

      to know this is not the apocalypse, and I am well-read

      enough to know all of this was set in motion long

      ago, plummet of seashells, the visions loud,

      obnoxious even, yes, I try to ignore them, but to no avail,

      the dead workers stream through my body, out my finger

      tips towards the moon’s underlying reality, trumps, keys,

      some move into hysteria then collapse or perhaps

      this is a vision of souls surrounded by black clouds, layers

      of breath, to close one’s mind to extraneous events,

      life streaming from chambers, music as event and so,

      love, I enter the scene before me, as many poets

      have before, walk through the gates of the imaginative

      space I have to create Dante, Milton, Plath, Lorde,

      leave the body, leave the comfort and pain of the body,

      enter the inferno, enter on the day of the Oakland

      fire when thirty-six lives are lost, one life for each year of mine,

      put my head to my knees, whisper, chant, sing, suggest,

      rip up the text of my hair, the alephs of my hair,

      my long black hair is a text and I will not cut it, my hair

      is a parable, a fantasy, a stage, it is burning, turning

      to snakes, witches, elves, it is an enormous

      Frankenstein on fire and the warehouse went up in its mass,

      and the body politic bled down, the dead queers, dead artists,

      crisis of landlords and evictions, midwinter, I leave

      this body behind, I had to see, I had to see what

      was behind the mirror’s arrangement of energy

      and madness, had to see through this furious parabola.

      I am a terrible American

      So suicidal

      I am a terrible, suicidal American

      who throws herself into your desiccated bank vaults

      Yet I do not want America to kill me before I kill myself

      I can’t stand my positive acquisitions

      I throw them to the dogs like marrowless bones

      I can’t stand my drinking

      I hate the fires of money

      I feel no nationalism

      I feel no nationalism in my heart, my hands, my brain, or my pussy

      I myself am worse than a rogue state

      I feel peeled away from society

      I will never leave my bed

      I want to die in my bed with the covers over my head

      The

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