Anytime Anybody
asks why don’t you go back I shrug my shoulders. Tell them I’m waiting for my father. I’m waiting for my father to answer that same question. I don’t say can you imagine what it feels like to leave & not ever not ever return. I don’t say can you imagine the faces of your cousins & uncles & aunts, can you map their faces from memory because it’s been over half a century since you saw them in the flesh. I don’t say memory is another form of death. I don’t say my father will die without stepping foot on the street on which he learned to walk. I don’t say he’ll never not ever go swimming at Siboney again or fly kites on the roof-deck of the high-rise on the corner of San Basilio & Clarín, the sky above or below. A throne of ceiba from which to hide & seek. I don’t say that when he left, Operación Pedro Pan would go on & go on to become the largest migration of unaccompanied minors in the history of human passage. I don’t say what he cannot say, because I know silence is another word for a bomb. I don’t say what I know what I’ve always known. That I feel it too. Somehow. Like a cut that stops bleeding but saves the scab where the untouched flesh once was. Mom, my mom. My mom was allowed to go back in the Nineties, after the Walls fell. Always plural. But no one ever asks me about that part of myself anyway. Which makes it easier & also hard. Easier because I can stay silent. Hard because I can stay silent. Everything, you know, is worth repeating. Everything I write out I write twice. The interrogation of strangers, historical time vs. personal time, drizzling, the damp sand. I want to say—but I’m angry now, & bitter, & my face—my face is something I can feel just by looking at the person who’s asking—so I say nothing but nothing, I don’t say anything but smile, as is my custom. & I do it by baring my teeth. & I do it by wondering where oh where are the great forgetters. I say my father took to America so much, he never wanted to leave. I don’t say America took my father in its arms & crushed him. I came out, like puss from a poisoned wound, the ribs of these United States. I don’t say I ever liked it, as if I ever had, you know, the choice.
&now (2019)
you have it
but you don’t
have it
in a poem
meanings converge (into/without)
collapsing. this is
its power—the ability
to (carry/dissolve)
the terms of
its own (composition/interrogation)
the poem as a technology
made for (dis)play & made for (dis)placing
the body with(in) its myth. like
dreaming in deep water
like a dream of deep water
like my sweat
which can tell you almost
everything once
collected
as if rubble could produce
a reliable surface.
as if reliable surfaces.
the memory of a goldfish
the sound of one
chopstick clapping
under the table my poem
contains multitudes all I contain
is this poem
really I see myself
in almost every text
I turn toward a mirror
for instance, this
is best viewed
on
larger screens
like the ocean that exceeds
comprehension. like the torso
that exceeds metaphor. the torso that exceeds
an outstretched palm, a lunging jaw
et. al (you get
it or you don’t & then
that’s the point)
the poem as (shimmer/shift/shaft)
which asks to be handled or hitched
to a vehicle or something suggestive
of a spear or arrow ’s cylindrical form
the sharply delineated beam of light
which shines through an opening
all experiential echoes which beg
whether we need a second
language in order to translate ; hyperlinks as
literary cruising
; digital spaces as receptacles for picking up
things (&/as) bodies (resemblance/assembly) our
hunger to be cut
horizontally. I have no right to keep
quiet about the synthesizer
I have no right to
fall into feeling
(I’m not god / I’m not good)
& what would you say
if you could
Chris Campanioni is the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of six books, including the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), which re-enacts the language of the Internet as literary installations. Recent writing has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, M/C: Media & Culture, DIAGRAM, Ambit, and Poetry International, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. Today he teaches at Pace University and Baruch College, and serves as a MAGNET mentor and Provost Fellow at The Graduate Center/CUNY, where he works on converging media studies with studies of migration.