N a p a l m   H e a l t h   S p a :   R e p o r t   2 0 1 3 :   S p e c i a l   E d i t i o n

L o n g   P o e m   M a s t e r p i e c e s   o f   t h e   P o s t b e a t s

 

 

AKILAH OLIVER

 

 

 

 

“The Putterer’s Notebook: an anti-Memoir” (excerpt)

 

 

The line, non-continuous remainder

 

                                    Waking and walking those streets post drag world, two rationed cities

situated in soviet anti-revivalism

 

                  ‘schwarze’ appears to be a declaration but I knew I couldn’t trust him when he

pretended he didn’t know that word plus in Boulder once, that lousy apartment building

on Canyon and 22nd,  he sold me fake meth.   a broken light bulb is a sad conductor

 

                                    foreign then faint

 

mediocre I first learned on normandie avenue when walking past barbershops, those men

& beards and what they do when men gather with electric razors and scissors sit in high

chairs,

 

the world  a postcard of old black men sitting on folding chairs in front of Brooklyn

brownstone with the caption ‘my Brooklyn, 4th annual photo + essay contest exhibition’

 

but looking now

                                    I can see they are not so old, just captured by a lens that condenses a body

to a dissipation, to a relic, to a mail slot

 

(this tone must have something to do with the not so alive, i.e. dead father)

 

                                    I this now, 

if this is not how one spells ‘leprechaun’ then it doesn’t exist as an idea or curatorial

curiosity

 

I had a breakfast nook when I didn’t pay for anything

 

                                    Keeping the steady pace seems to be the key, not to look down at the

cracks but rather memorize their proximity to the leg’s, stride, the motion, so as to not tip

(and pour me out)

 

On the way to the beans and  rice, red would be better today rather than pinto, I

think I hear a bell-bottom pants leg flapping in a mothership, but that would be

the los angeles coliseum hosting history in ’72 or so,

the humidity here , but not a here that would indicate there, that place,  now

pestering the mind like hunger

 

                                    Shhh, stop that racket, derrida’s whispering about the politics of friendship

& that French accent is making it two times hard to hear already, like the ‘hissing of

summer lawns’, fanon in his masks

 

I want the radio on again to discover the new music and it be perhaps sexy, the butt

slapping braying on a video screen, wouldn’t it be nice

 

There was a song about a teapot, won’t you tip me over and pour me out, & now I see

how young you were then,

fun is the password

 

                                    Daddy’s here in a silver buick leSabre and its time for the beach, goodbye

mother, so sorry you’re not happy but could we have pork n beans next Friday and hug

 

                  The beginning notes, an entry into a dream that is a faille like texture, one that

does not need to hesitate at the entry into the messiah’s denouement

 

                  False documentary declarations, like “when time moved forward”, as if time were

able to do things like that, as if it were an action rather than a calculation, a marker, a

decision and counter, a mathematical construction

 

It was if they had switched themselves, physically, and I had not moved though I

had, and by many narrative accounts tragically so

remembering one unmentionable which I told once to my ‘best friend’, now

hoping she’s forgotten that intimacy

 

Such as such intimacies present as the declaration of a perimeter

 

 

 

you

 

 

..                                                                                       .                                                    .               

 

;                                  ;                                  ‘                                                    ;                                  ;                :

 

.                                  ,                                  ,                                  ,                ,,               ,,

 

 

                  you were not concluding a desire, backed against the wall, your upper thigh

exposed through the riddling stockings

 

                 

as  an event can simultaneously be happening and not be occurring, a

very first morning

 

a passing across the self,  & my old friend the radio, red velvet hot pants, a

fashion show graduation from the Sears Charm School for girls, mix and match

 

I wanted a self so badly, I turned the dial to see what was on the other side, joan

armatrading, we tried chance translations of ‘jah’ based loosely on context clues, that girl

my sister, I saw her last month in l.a. at the wedding, I thought she’d be a surfer or the

wife of an O.G., surprise all the time, Christian lady, you look so much younger now, as

if all the blighted apartments have been repaired

 

what a pretty world out there

 

I am a new occupant, but this particular morning, for example, found me

wandering in terrorist shadows

 

The death dreams are often sexualized, the first, a morphing pool of consecrated

limbs floundering and touching in what appeared a murky body pool

 

to get to, one had to pass through a portal, not a door exactly, more like a veil, it

was duplicitous its appearance, both sensuous and repelling, quicksand like, pleasure in

the going down, the limbs indistinguishable from the souls,  a man who was neither

good nor evil seemed to be the sentry

 

I kept telling him not to go, I couldn’t stop him from going, I tried to trick him

with an earth-based attachment to me to keep him from going, I had to witness him go

down there with the altered bodies, there to that feast

 

 

 

a recovery that exposes itself as an expectation

 

                  as if to speak requires dream

 

                  single lines staged as tracks

 

                  we are not stating a truth

 

                  a truth would require more negotiation than water rights

 

                  an expectation relegates mystery to a rack

 

                  it may be true that he was saying “dismissal”

 

                  it may be true we expected more, then gradually less

 

                  as if a dream expires

 

 

 

[Reprinted from Napalm Health Spa: Report 2008.]

 

 

Akilah Oliver (1961–2011) was born in St. Louis and grew up in Los Angeles. In the 1990’s she founded and performed with the feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. For several years, Akilah lived in Boulder, Colorado, where she raised her son Oluchi McDonald (1982–2003) and was a teacher, activist and beloved member of the community at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In New York City, Akilah taught poetry and writing at The New School, Pratt Insitute and The Poetry Project, where she also served as Monday Night Readings Coordinator in 07-08.  She was a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School and a member of the Belladonna Collaborative. Oliver’s books include A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House 2009) the she said dialogues: flesh memory, which received the PEN Beyond Margins Award, and the chapbooks An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna 2006), “a(A)ugust” (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007) and A Collection of Objects (Tente 2010). She read and performed her work as a solo artist throughout the United States and collaborated with a variety of artists and musicians including Tyler Burba, Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye and Rasul Siddik.