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I’m at a party where everybody has matching towels.

I’m lying. This is the setup of “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s.

Björk was right: poems can lie. Omission is a common artist’s lie.

A good book of poems could host deep dives on the feel of each

felt thing, each fleck of one’s lived life: dusts of knuckle

hair; how the hospital smelled; the faint sea-salt taste

on another’s neck; what color

the coffin was; through which shapes

light sieved down the forest’s trees—yet, somehow,

a luck-size gap: not a word on money worries.

I’m at a party I didn’t pay to attend since I’m on the list.

The gays throwing it craft lengthy manifestos on community

care and the impermissibility of all -isms within the space

and charge forty dollars at the door. You, too, can cruise

utopia nightly for the price of one disposable income. The money

you have and the people you know: two ropes. A climb to safety,

or the bind round the neck. There was a free flight from New York to Havana

for the children of Cuban parents in the ’80s, my mother tells me, which she

boarded with her sister. She, thirteen; sister, nineteen. They return the next week,

and later, hear Alpha 66—a Cuban-exile, anti-Castro group—had planned a bombing.

From my abuelo they hear this. The right men knew him, and when they learned

his girls were there, the plan for the plane changed.

I’m at a party answering a question for which I lack a good answer

like it’s a job interview. Now and again, someone asks how I see my

life, ideally. I often think I don’t need much more than some leisure.

Pleasure. Simple white sheets and someone with me on top of them,

like K was. He brewed coffee the morning after first hosting me.

It was a Tuesday. Windows in two walls glowed us gold. His robe

slipped right back off. I wanted him over and over; we knew

we’d have to work soon, but it felt like we didn’t.

Source: The Atlantic

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