Carla Harryman, Poem with Photography

Against Interpretation of the Heartland Notes

To work, to get there, to move, to pollute               

To complain and share info, what you do

To file

To mask and sanitize

To request a day off

To be granted or denied

Unemployment claims

To whisper then shriek

To scour and horde

To rifle through the capital

To scrape by

To interrupt

To live through

To ask for

To guard and look away

To distance

To refuse

To distance

To mask to glove to sanitize

To be invited

To a funeral

To go or to wait

To be invited to the next one

In order to share space

To stand back or move forward

To equivocate or sequester

Thought, congregation, community

To hide the house

To open the door to leash the dog to give into a mood     

To carry

To intone the past, the future

To instruct remotely

“I know what was written” to learn something

New and already known, sponging it up, folding it 

Into an expanded communique 

Car horns demand

The extra common of no community

To hanker for froth

To give a little lip

To remember to be responsible for my own feelings

To leverage an idea

Check

To make a picture of a region in the abstract, similar to this

Check

Wishful of public sphere, counter public, seductive non-space

Check Jack

In-the-box, rehearsals

Sanguine language and clapping

Echoes, ringing out

Through the bottom rung

A remote control

Of the not-yet-remembered 

The not-yet flowered

The yet-to-be modernized

the yet-to-be dignified

the yet-to-be genocide

To get out of its way

To know what is normal

And what is not if

Normality is death

Interrupted, thus

To undergird with noise

To take a second for a minute

To breathe to think to conjecture

To research and to share

In an emergency

To distance socially          

To converse about Hannah Hoch, internal immigration, environmental analytics

To find comedy in spikey leaves

Irreverence growing through a fence           

To locate a robin’s nest

To keep their eggs safe from oneself

To avoid contact with the doctor

To avoid the hospital

To work there

To have signed up or to have not signed up

For the job

To have signed up or to have not signed up

For the job

To be there, netted in the world

With or without one’s consent

To belong to your family, or not

Feel that it is real

To volunteer and to make PPE

For donation or sale

To support or pay forward the positive news

Mention the incarcerated

Tip the hat

To reveal an administrative

Corporate bullish hand

To sway and control

Stack the deck and scour

Mad Love 

To hold on fiercely to it

“If you can find it,” or

To parry the language of it

Trim the garden as a signal                          

Of affection and restlessness

Of a refusal to eat tyrant’s shit

To hurtle through space together

To have no place left to live

To camp or stand or shiver in that region

To carry all that’s neither right nor wrong

To those guardians of the false

To lose and to insist

To make an arrangement and leave behind

The era we are in

To get over it

To force the future to open

To the 14% with three times the mortality

To give the future up

To murder 

Someone for doing their job

To palliate

To take away

To not abide

To hurtle through space

To carry the air

To remember slogans like “to never forget”

To follow through

To settle up and to unsettle

Normal

To loiter

To feel unwelcome

To let discomfort be an aspect                                 

Of the through line

To “Keep it moving”

Then question the language

Before obeying its message

To not message or disseminate

To prioritize one line over another

One life under a blanket

To falter

In a question

Is there still a world?

While still here on earth

Exit the bus

Stop it

To make demands of the homeless shelter on wheels

That is not driverless, just a city bus

A poetry derived from transit

Stops the bus twice in the middle

To compromise the life of the driver

The life of the passenger, the observer’s perspective

There can be only journalists present, and city officials, a little union, and drivers

Families are to stay home, as well as friends or allies

To edit “us”

Labor thrown under the bus

Is to be honored

To accept the survival mode

Badges of courage

To resent declarations and to position oneself against them

To protect sovereignty and to “make sacred that which is not” – Safaa Fathy

To narrow, then amplify

To dust up the moon

Suggest an image and obscure

A familiar rapprochement 

To make decisions based in repression, where they are always partly made

To look farther into the future

And therefore, to “wait and see” to wait to “predict”

To despise the predictors and protect oneself from the conspiracy of big data

To “be good to yourself”

To be the first toy yet-to-be in stock

To monopolize the attention of everybody

To hate the dupers

To fear the duped, ignorant, obedient masses

In their trust of science

To be the nurse living or dying with the ventilated patient

Asynchronously

Sequestered in a region plotted with paranoid visionaries

Not knowing who was to drink the bleach

Someone in a mask or without one, something stepping over the required line

To refuse to queue

To go shopping just because of wanting something, unable 

To possess a can of beer

To eat burgers and fries, day upon day, watching TV in a scene of vindictive power

That looks like a hotel room

You ask me how I would know

To cook up some lentils, to virtue signal, to sign up for

The panicked planet housing start, la planète affolée

Her made love is my shameful ornamental attachment

It flourishes beyond money, it deletes the e on hope, moves by hop

I want to hop over, to pop in

There is something irrational to tell you

“You don’t always wait for me,” planet

Masked and sanitized, scoured and horded

Rifled through

“To know where I am” with a numb butt

Under protective cloud cover

A native plant thrives, as good as gold when value is                       

Meaning mutating                              (May 3-6 2020 )