Jesse Rice-Evans
[Outro with Survival]
When I think about the when, I know so little
I have let so much sift away, so much to seek forgiveness for. Now i can recognize where it begins,
where the edges begins to crumble away:
memories I want to work away [Solange]
or seeking a fucked-up that I haven’t felt in years
How do we leave behind the grief of life?
The stuff that clings like honey, like a film of gnats?
It’s a grief in everything
We all feel it: Carolina summer coppering, a char that hunkers down competing for a seat inside
Knowledge is the beginning of something tumultuous: I am jealous of writers writing about their traumas.
What gives you the [right] ability to hold these traumas close to you in the ways that you must hold them
close?
[Please come with me & tell me how, show me, show me how please show me how to get close without panic
or flight orb like a parachute opening against the rush of wind below my throat: please loose me please I am a
fist a fist]
Build up to color: remember as a reminder: how I can abandon
They keep saying just do something about it well if I constantly enraged my skin pinks up like a rosebud and I am
gnawing gnawing everything inside me boils on a roll, a boiling gnawing roll, a rolling gnaw engorging
I am surviving but for how long?
I have let so much sift away, so much to seek forgiveness for. Now i can recognize where it begins,
where the edges begins to crumble away:
memories I want to work away [Solange]
or seeking a fucked-up that I haven’t felt in years
How do we leave behind the grief of life?
The stuff that clings like honey, like a film of gnats?
It’s a grief in everything
We all feel it: Carolina summer coppering, a char that hunkers down competing for a seat inside
Knowledge is the beginning of something tumultuous: I am jealous of writers writing about their traumas.
What gives you the [right] ability to hold these traumas close to you in the ways that you must hold them
close?
[Please come with me & tell me how, show me, show me how please show me how to get close without panic
or flight orb like a parachute opening against the rush of wind below my throat: please loose me please I am a
fist a fist]
Build up to color: remember as a reminder: how I can abandon
They keep saying just do something about it well if I constantly enraged my skin pinks up like a rosebud and I am
gnawing gnawing everything inside me boils on a roll, a boiling gnawing roll, a rolling gnaw engorging
I am surviving but for how long?
Future in Neon Blue (and Red)
after Blade Runner (1987)
after Blade Runner (1987)
Having uploaded memories is the same as having actual memories. The kind of lighting that blasts sideways
through frosted glass paneling. Incept dates. If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.
One wall all windows. You know what to look for. I can’t believe anything you say. A hundred baby spiders
came out and they ate her.
We are finally
in one room together.
Technology and personhood
have never made sense together
but here we are anyway.
Small kindness means nothing when we are all lost.
Small kindness is everything when we are so wracked by trauma as to be close to destruction, always closer.
In the future, Orientalism is everywhere.
Every light is neon.
Buildings are jammed or they are abandoned.
For genetic designers, every body is a toy.
I’m sort of an orphan, but not by much.
It’s easy for me to forget—if memories come and go, how do I know what to keep? My mouth is full of
photographs, a glass of bourbon between my knees, money is over but no one talks about it. There is
someone in the mirror who isn’t me.
Being in a city is kind of like having an extended nightmare. Last night, I dreamed about my best friend from
11th grade who felt as claustrophobic as I did but had the money to do something about it. He moved to
Germany to finish high school; I started using whenever I could. I woke up heartbroken. I saw him again, but
I never helped his dad harvest tomatoes, listen to Notorious B.I.G. on his record player, smoke on his front
porch stoop and walking through his not-quite-downtown neighborhood, winding paved streets, manicured
parks flanking creeks, walkable. I woke up heartbroken.
Wrench my love from me like an agreed-upon weapon.
When I rinse my mouth, blood comes out.
My eyes shine like hospital lamps. I won’t chase after you, only your perfect eyebrows and bowed mouth.
Leave those on the end table when you go.
Incept date. Longevity. Things I need to know about myself: accelerated decrepitude.
I feel my way through a windowless room.
through frosted glass paneling. Incept dates. If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.
One wall all windows. You know what to look for. I can’t believe anything you say. A hundred baby spiders
came out and they ate her.
We are finally
in one room together.
Technology and personhood
have never made sense together
but here we are anyway.
Small kindness means nothing when we are all lost.
Small kindness is everything when we are so wracked by trauma as to be close to destruction, always closer.
In the future, Orientalism is everywhere.
Every light is neon.
Buildings are jammed or they are abandoned.
For genetic designers, every body is a toy.
I’m sort of an orphan, but not by much.
It’s easy for me to forget—if memories come and go, how do I know what to keep? My mouth is full of
photographs, a glass of bourbon between my knees, money is over but no one talks about it. There is
someone in the mirror who isn’t me.
Being in a city is kind of like having an extended nightmare. Last night, I dreamed about my best friend from
11th grade who felt as claustrophobic as I did but had the money to do something about it. He moved to
Germany to finish high school; I started using whenever I could. I woke up heartbroken. I saw him again, but
I never helped his dad harvest tomatoes, listen to Notorious B.I.G. on his record player, smoke on his front
porch stoop and walking through his not-quite-downtown neighborhood, winding paved streets, manicured
parks flanking creeks, walkable. I woke up heartbroken.
Wrench my love from me like an agreed-upon weapon.
When I rinse my mouth, blood comes out.
My eyes shine like hospital lamps. I won’t chase after you, only your perfect eyebrows and bowed mouth.
Leave those on the end table when you go.
Incept date. Longevity. Things I need to know about myself: accelerated decrepitude.
I feel my way through a windowless room.
Specimen: Barrier Island
At the end of the barrier island, sand pipers flit into the surf and scurry back from the froth, your headlights
dim in the distance: this is the place you lost your phone in the heap of jeans and dune, ghost crabs scuttling
just out of view of the swollen moon, slippery legged teens breaking curfew.
Was this before or after I carried you from the driver’s seat to the dusty gravel of the driveway outside my
best friend’s downstairs apartment 2 miles from the beach, where we smoked bongs and played the same
records over and over: Peaches, Sufjan Stevens, more than a couple takes of Hail to the Thief. You always took
acid before hopping in your car to whip through every humid night, how loose your skin grew as you shrunk
into your head, eyes slack, somewhere inside.
You got so skinny those last couple of years, before stopping out of college, after telling me the story of
losing your virginity in your middle school science lab, before I admitted how much I wanted to be there with
you, but it was OK I could finally get away from you, how the stupid teen enigma of your voice, how I found
out you knew my name when I melted into the rigid carpet of my bedroom
Call me specimen
Call me home
Call me the knife in your thigh, the compass broken in your coat pocket;
you're the unsent letter
from the left coast, the jar
collecting coins and small
seashells, the altar on
the windowsill gloomed
under same fat moon
dim in the distance: this is the place you lost your phone in the heap of jeans and dune, ghost crabs scuttling
just out of view of the swollen moon, slippery legged teens breaking curfew.
Was this before or after I carried you from the driver’s seat to the dusty gravel of the driveway outside my
best friend’s downstairs apartment 2 miles from the beach, where we smoked bongs and played the same
records over and over: Peaches, Sufjan Stevens, more than a couple takes of Hail to the Thief. You always took
acid before hopping in your car to whip through every humid night, how loose your skin grew as you shrunk
into your head, eyes slack, somewhere inside.
You got so skinny those last couple of years, before stopping out of college, after telling me the story of
losing your virginity in your middle school science lab, before I admitted how much I wanted to be there with
you, but it was OK I could finally get away from you, how the stupid teen enigma of your voice, how I found
out you knew my name when I melted into the rigid carpet of my bedroom
Call me specimen
Call me home
Call me the knife in your thigh, the compass broken in your coat pocket;
you're the unsent letter
from the left coast, the jar
collecting coins and small
seashells, the altar on
the windowsill gloomed
under same fat moon
Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a queer femme rhetorician and PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center researching intersections of language, disability, and digital culture. Read her nonfiction and poetry in Entropy, WUSSY, Nat. Brut, Monstering, and others. She's also a Carly Rae Jepsen enthusiast, a Leo, and a weekend witch.