Ode to Carly Rae Jepsen, To Be Sung Next To The Amps and Drowned By The Vibrato of Bass
After Hanif Abdurraqib
How can you say the sky is clear,
when it is clearly holding the whole world in place?
say it sits there and does nothing but wakes up
to see you again and yes, sometimes Sky cries
tears so cold we all get sick and Sky never gets better
and yes sometimes Sky smiles so much the mouth
of it bares fangs,
oh how sharp a mouth can be when it kisses for the first time,
how big the jaws of Sky are, and I get it.
I get how it looks to be clear, like glass, like shatter,
like enough pressure and we become dust all over again,
but it can sit there with the weight of our sadness
and only vibrate out it’s eyes, not glass but stone,
chunks of quartz melding into your palm,
a blood type that is found only in the places where Sky cannot see.
Have you ever been held so vigorously you no longer feel it?
The sky that loves this body without touching it holds me
in the palm of it’s mouth, floats this body in it’s heart and
it’s hands, the parts of the sky that the sun and the moon live in.
I am not going to say I did not wish to be held
in the crowd by someone familiar but I also can not say that
I wasn’t held above the crowd anyways,
suspended by the 21st Century mystic of pop,
how the spray of bass and lights made affection
a naturally occurring element, made the weight of my heart
dense enough to suspend itself from the rafters without the noose.
How this body does not trust itself to be tender, but I know not to deny
myself the safety of a hand to hold that has also
been broken in the same breathe.
let down my guard tonight, I just don’t care anymore...
warm blood feels
GOOD
I can’t control it anymore.
Alain Ginsberg is an agender writer and performer from Baltimore City whose work focuses on narratives of gender, sexuality, and mental health and the ways in which trauma informs, or skews them. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming on Shabby Doll House, Rogue Agent, decomP, and elsewhere. Outside of writing they tour the country performing in concerts, slams, living rooms, and caverns. They are a taurus.