sandra simonds
I Cried When I Read Your Personal Website |
You have written a lot of books. They are good.
I have written a lot of books too. I think they are pretty good. You are going to go to the places white males go—far away. You are such a good teacher. You are such a good blogger. You have won many teaching awards because you care a lot about your students. Your tweets are funny (but not too funny). You are good looking but not in that “he might be a serial killer” kind of way. You’ve never erased any of your Facebook posts out of shame. I have. It’s so embarrassing. One of the ones I erased but everyone saw was “I’m so sick of being objectified by men.” You have never cried in public. I have. I do it a lot in fact. Sometimes I cry in my car. I even cry at work and I just feel like at this point, so what? You are going to go really far because the university where we got our degrees will make that happen because you have a penis and you are white and you are a good teacher and you’re funny (but not too funny) and you’re good- looking (but not too good looking, obviously). You are right. I really shouldn’t read your personal website. I should look inward. I have choices. “You have a choice. You can either look at his personal website or not,” my friend said. You have a “contact page.” Maybe I should contact you but then I might sound like a resentful bitch and worse, if I try not to sound like a resentful bitch, I’ll probably sound even more like one so fuck it. I’m not contacting you. I had this crazy dream. You were in love with me and we were walking around campus and everything was suddenly the way it all probably looks from where you are, from your position. Kind of like not being on the bottom of sex all the time but instead, being on top of it for once and basically being able to look beyond the body, the flesh, beyond the lover in order to coordinate the whole thing. Anyway, there we were, all dreamy and glorious, and filled with moons and stars and all that shit you dream of as if that kind of dream is possible and I really bought into it too you know, like it was really happening, that warped and vaguely transgressive reality (and don’t dismiss this as another “it was all a dream poem”) (and don’t dismiss this as another “She hates all white men poem”) of you and me and walking around not campus now but the real first world, the world of money and cars and things that people get when they are who they are and it was fucking magical, frankly why anyone would glorify poverty is beyond me I mean we were “living the dream” as my students and former classmates from high school say you see because I’m also a good teacher and really pay attention to what people tell me like my students tell me to look up the rapper Peewee Longway’s mixtape and so I do it because they know things I don’t know things do you know things yeah you know all the things because the world tells you you know everything but you don’t know a fucking thing because you’re always the first one to speak man, I can’t even tell you what I want to say but mostly I’m fucking sorry. You know today I texted the same text to three different men “Do you even have any fucking clue what it’s like to just be objectified over and over and over every day of your life” and “fuck you” and “fuck all the men like you” but still I’m so sorry and I’m happy for you that you got a job in Hawaii or whatever but the thing is that in our dream we were actually on the same page and there wasn’t a top or bottom and I think we were really in love and you threw your very sophisticated personal website in the bonfire ocean and I threw mine in there too with all the dead links and outdated bullshit to promote something like this poem and all the old photos of my face just melted and so did the university which we named as a kind of enemy to our love and the love of our students and the love of our love of our students and we were all on the same page for once like this is great we are really getting somewhere at the top of the world but the real top which meant no hierarchy to be found no desert or sea no more corporate longings no desire constructed by machines no desire constructed by the image complexes that we think we love but we do not love no more of any of that I could see beyond that body and so could you so we could love each other as we do not now and cannot given our precise differing circumstances and I could not recognize or face myself in that ionic sea in that molten sea in that sea of unthinking in that sea of lovely sea and so then it was like being at the top of the world, you know, we were triumphant you and me and so when we said love prevails it meant something beyond some superficial idea planted in the minds of the naïve and all of our students were there too and then I felt this coldness and I realized that my three year old daughter had crawled into my bed in the middle of the night and had pissed in the bed and it woke me up and of course I was dead |
SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently the Sonnets from Bloof Books. Follow her on Twitter @sandmansimonds
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