Robin Tremblay-McGaw

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“we” as some horizon. jostled. we in specificity, here in this room, this public square, this contentious TikTok court. in case. we that is marching. we that dissipates, falls apart, we never together. rapacious. razing. in care. embellish. this temporary we. inflicts. this supporting cast. cut we. we blink. other tongues song telling. this imagined we. was there. this restive. we on the sidelines. we weeds. resists. we waiting in the wings. friended. living a multitude. all through the night. feeling leaps bodies. once we dreamed we had become ourselves, rare as lenticular clouds marking the direction of wind. a human mic in one arena. some of us hired as nameless extras. in another. pressed in the wings, off stage. recording chemical residues registering social instabilities. pointed wish fulfillment. historical & futuristic they we saw us. strata. aspirant. extractive we. they pointed to us. downed. star dust. too late. astonishing. risable. vicious, too. we thought about “us.” about “them.” as gathered, first. they thought us. stretched into a ribbed pattern. or root systems. in tangle. we ourselves an I. we that would return, returns. waves. their eyes. all their/our signals. selves. who is us? if I were. we think we are. outside. some crossing. the multitudes spoke. what was heard. escaped. we read. she is an I becoming. she/they is becoming a collection or leaving him or gathering with her, them. distinct. some third place. wrapt. loop holes. into nets. some practice parting. as if waters. let slip. way we. became, were. a thicker layer. reeds we. were, beyond us or them. we concealed a heaving and rolling mass only partly marked by notes on the page

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after Calamities by Renee Gladman

I began the day waking from a dream in which I was a person cleaning, wiping someone else’s shelves, slogging through dust and something rancid, liquid, mucilaginous. I wondered if this was a waste of a dream. I began the day acknowledging I like a surface to be clean. That is, gesture generates an accumulated and acculturated body for others. I name myself to restore a hover: I am not a white glove, but my grandmothers were and my mother is. I began the sentence and left it on a verb, the copula waving existence, the knotted antithesis of movement and paralysis, thing and person. I began the day attempting to solve problems. I turned on the little space heater and closed the windows open all night. I remained in my body on the bed, feeling prone. I began the day as a worker, a body. a dreamer asking for solutions, recognizing history’s rhythm, pulsating in the same which returns even here in its inversions. walking out into a network, an image of a tree, a forest of wounds

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Every image leaves the body


might be—by night or the car at the intersection—why then to delay not too important virtue and counting hope between folds exquisite and gaps of cloth of becoming bringing forth anything for fields of red poppies in paint the lemon rinds rats have nibbled (pared to pulp) a rose eddying the clouds so dramatic a man will tie himself to the mast for them Wenders’ angels haunting the library Americans protesting rent Amazon and Whole Foods workers on a sick-out prisoners petitioning for hope for ecstatic identities while dolphins in Venice’s clear canals waiting to have the sun strike pronghorn antelope in Death Valley coyotes in crosswalks the garden eels in Tokyo are afraid of humans who now arrive late to sound become music are known to nobody, least of all themselves, the whole life story escaping from the private becoming history which we becomes it, the lonely self, body hands mouth called to be the lips first one sings from the rooftop and then another we witness must borrow a windy artifice, tell about beginning

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Why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?


She fails to recognize him; there are two angels in dazzling robes. Out the window the sea shifts from a powdered blue nearly white in the southerly direction to deeper darker blues nearer here. a surfer is out there in the waves waiting. not surfing the web or multitasking though the mind is free and might, I am guessing, be “doing” other things, imagining, meditating, talking as one does on a run. a flow state. but, riding or waiting for a wave that might be hitched, the body and board rolling up with it, falling, paddling to the side of it, or out into and beyond it, calm strokes, willing oneself to the ocean, giving oneself to the tides, coming up among the white of a crest and crash, nearby pelicans swooping low, diving under, soaring near the surface, unperturbed by the human seal and three kayaks midway to the horizon. hours in flotation. other sea birds I can’t name. the surfer slips onto the top of the wave, kicks and turns from it. one kayak moves from right to left, headed north. the angels in dazzling robes frame the place where there was a body.

She supposed it was the gardener. He had asked her “who will you suffer for?”

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A woman sweats in bed                                        a woman is dreaming


and is in a performance in a room with a large screen she is hooking up an iPad so that it will project scenes from a film of another performance queued up is another recording. she begins she begins by saying these are just opening remarks. she is thinking of bowls and speaking beside. she says this thing that Trinh-T. Minh-ha has said, acknowledging Minh-ha. She worries what she is engaged in is threadbare, unprepared. her co-conspirators break in by opening a door from a room within this room. things begin to go another way.

                                                in the dream the woman

                                                                                  does not sweat

                                                the woman on the bed is

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