Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr was born in 1966 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Her poems have been published in such places as The Baffler, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, The Village Voice, and The Best American Poetry 2002. Spahr’s three full-length collections are Response (Sun & Moon, 1996), a National Poetry Series Selection; Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); and This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005). She is also the author of the book of criticism Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001), the coeditor (with poet Claudia Rankine) of American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and the coeditor (with Joan Retallack) of Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). With poet Jena Osman, Spahr coedits the journal Chain. She frequently self-publishes her work at http://people.mills.edu/jspahr) and lives Oakland, California.

localism or t/here

for Susan Schultz

There is no there there anywhere.

There is no here here or anywhere either.

Here and there. He and she. There, there.

Oh yes. We are lost there and here.

And here and there we err.

And we are that err.

And we are that lost.

And we are arrows of loving lostness gliding, gliding, off, and off, and

off, gliding.

And arrows of unloving lostness getting stuck even while never hitting

the mark.

And we are misunderstanding fullness and emptiness.

And we are missing our bed and all its comforts that come night after

night without end and sometimes during the day also and are singular

even when coupled, doubled, and tripled and have something to do with ie

comforter’s down coming from the duck.

Oh here, you are all that we want.

Oh here, come here.

You are rich and dark with soil.

And you are encouraging of growing.

And you are a soft rain without complaint that refreshes and stimulates.

And you are full of seeds.

And you are as accepting of the refrigerator as you are of the bough loaded

with fruit.

And you and you and you are here and there and there and here and you are

here and there and tear.

December 1, 2002

Beloveds, yours skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest of

yous.

When I speak of skin I speak of the largest organ.

I speak of the separations that define this world and the separations

that define us beloveds, even as we like to press our skins against

one another in the night.

When I speak of skin I speak of lighting candles to remember

AIDS and the history of attacks in Kenya.

I speak of toxic fumes given off by plastic flooring in a burning

nightclub in Caracas.

I speak of the forty-seven dead in Caracas.

And I speak of the four dead in Palestine.

And of the three dead in Israel.

I speak of those dead in other parts of the world that go unreported.

I speak of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly

wings and hurricanes.

I speak of one hundred and fifty people sheltering at the Catholic

Mission in the city of Man.

I speak of a diverted Ethiopian airliner, US attacks on Iraqi air

defense sites, and warnings not to visit Yemen.

Here, where we are with our separate skins polished by sweet

smelling soaps and the warm, clean water of our shower, we sit in

our room in the morning and the sounds of birds are outside our

windows and the sun shines.

When I speak of yours skins, I speak of newspaper headlines in

other countries and different newspaper headlines here.

I speak of how the world suddenly seems as if it is a game of some

sort, a game where troops are massed on a flat map of the world

and if one looks at the game board long enough one can see the

patterns even as one is powerless to prevent them.

I speak of the memory of the four floating icebergs off the coast of

Argentina and the thirty thousand dead salmon in the Klamath

river this year.

I speak of how I cannot understand our insistence on separations

and how these separations have nothing and everything to do with

the moments when we feel joined and separated from each others.

I speak of the intimate relationship between salmons and humans,

between humans and icebergs, between icebergs and salmons, and

how this is just the beginning of the circular list.

I speak of those moments when we do not understand why we

must remain separated or joined only in the most mundane ways.

I speak of why our skin is our largest organ and how it keeps us

contained.

I speak of the preservation of a balanced internal environment,

shock absorbers, temperature regulators, insulators, sensators,

lubrications, protections and grips, and body odor.

I speak of the Pew study on Anti-Americanism and the three C’s of

the IRA—Columbia, Castlereagh, and Stormont Castle—and I speak

of the unconfirmed dead in Iraq from the bombing of a refinery at

Basrah.

When I speak of skin I speak of a slow day in the forces that are

compelling all of us to be brushing up against one another.

When I speak of skin I speak of the crowds that are gathering all

together to meet each other with various intents.

When I speak of skin I speak of all the movement in the world

right now and all the new boundaries of the right now that are

made by all the movement in the world right now and then broken

by the movement in the world right now.

But when I speak of skin I do not speak of the arbitrary

connotations of color that have made all of this brushing against

one another even harder for all of us.

Beloveds, yours skins are of all colors, are soft and wrinkled,

blotchy and reddish, full of blemish and smooth.

Our world is small, contained within 1.4 to 2 square meters of

surface area.

Yet it is all the world that each of us has and so we all return to it,

to the softening of it and to the defoliating of it and to the moisture

that we bring to it.

December 4, 2002

Embedded deep in our cells is ourselves and everyone else.

Going back ten generations we have nine thousand ancestors and

going back twenty-five we get thirty million.

All of us shaped by all of us and then other things as well, other

things such as the flora and the fauna and all the other things as

well.

When I speak of yours thighs and their long muscles of

smoothness, I speak of yours cells and I speak of the British

Embassy being closed in Kenya and the US urging more

aggressive Iraq inspections and the bushfire that is destroying

homes in Sydney.

And I speak of at least one dead after rioting in Dili and the arrest

of Mukhlas, and Sharon’s offer of forty percent of the West Bank

and the mixed results of Venezuela’s oil strike and the overtures

that Khatami is making to the US.

When I speak of the curve of yours cheeks, their soft down, their

cell after cell, their smoothness, their even color, I speak of the

NASA launch and the child Net safety law and the Native Linux

pSeries Server.

When I speak of our time together, I speak also of the new theories

of the development of the cell from iron sulphide, formed at the

bottom of the oceans.

I speak of the weight of the alien planet.

And I speak of the benefits of swaddling sleeping babies.

Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in

order to find the optimum way of lacing shoes. The bow tie pattern

is the most efficient.

I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous.

I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to understand the

swirls of patterns.

But there is no efficient way.

The news refreshes every few minutes on the computer screen and

on the television screen. The stories move from front to back and

then off the page and then perhaps forward again in a motion that I

can’t predict but I suspect is not telling the necessary truths.

I can’t predict our time together either. Or why we like each other

like we do.

I have no idea when our bodies will feel very good to one of us or

to all of us together or to none of us.

The drive to press against one another that is there at moments and

then gone at others.

The drive to press up against others in the same way.

January 28, 2003

Yesterday the UN report on weapons inspections was released.

Today Israel votes and the death toll rises.

Four have died in clashes in the West Bank town of Jenin.

Yesterday, three died in an explosion at a Gaza City house.

Since last Monday US troops have surrounded eighty Afghans and

killed eighteen.

Protests against the French continue in the Ivory Coast.

Nothing makes any sense today beloveds.

I wake up to a beautiful, clear day.

A slight breeze blows off the Pacific.

It is morning and it is amazing in its simple morningness.

I leave the house early so I miss the parrots but outside the door I

stop to listen to the ugly song of the red-bottomed bulbuls.

It is so calm here and yet so momentous in the rest of the world.

Amid ignorant armies and darkling plains, the news has

momentarily stopped trying to make sense and the stories appear

with a doubleness.

Israel said the four killed today were armed men and were killed in

a series of clashes.

Palestine claims they were shot in running battles.

Palestine claims the bomb explosion in Gaza was caused by a

missile from an Israeli helicopter.

Israel claims it was a Palestinian bomb that exploded prematurely.

In the Ivory Coast some school boys sing, “France for the French,

Ivory Coast for the Ivorians. Everyone go home. We are

xenophobes and so what.”

Others carry signs that say “Down with France, long live the US”

and “No more French, from now on we speak English” and sing

“USA, USA, USA” against the French.

Later today Bush will speak.

How can we be true to one another with histories of place so deep,

so layered we can’t begin to sort through it here in the middle of

the Pacific with its own deep unsortable history?

I left our small apartment that is perched at the side of a dormant

volcano that goes miles down to the ocean floor, perches on layer

after layer of exploding history.

It wasn’t just our history of place but the contradiction of the US

taking unilateral military action to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass

destruction that entered our two small rooms and we just wanted to

leave and get on with the day’s mundanenesses—email and

photocopies and desk chairs and telephones.

While driving away from our small apartment, beloveds, I turned

on the radio.

Today on the radio, Christie Brinkley exists and her worries about

Billy Joel’s driving abilities exist.

A lawsuit exists where Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas

are suing Hello! magazine for poor-quality wedding photos.

U2 spy planes exist flying over the Koreas.

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen’s plan to eradicate hunger in Brazil

exists.

Heart disease in women exists.

John Malvo’s trial exists.

Aretha Franklin exists and a subpoena for her exists.

Hackers of the Recording Industry Association of America website

exist.

Thalidomide exists.

Zoe Ball exists.

And Fatboy Slim exists but now without Zoe Ball.

Bronze Age highways in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey continue to exist.

Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere, lead actors in Chicago, exist.

Cell phones and tunnel vision exist.

Cable problems exist in a crash in Charlotte.

A dismembered mother, the shoe bomber’s letters, Scott Peterson’s

wife and girlfriend, Brian Patrick Regan’s letters to Hussein and

Gadhafi, nineteen thousand gallons of crude oil in the frozen

Nemadji River, all of this exists.

The world goes on and on, spins tighter and then looser on a

wobbling axis, and it has a list of adjectives to describe it, such as

various and beautiful and new, but neither light, nor certitude, nor

peace exist.