An excerpt from Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

An excerpt from Nature Poem

 

Onstage I’m a mess

of tremor and sweat

I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the 
faces

of attention and danger

The gift of panic is clarity—repeat the known quantities:

 

Today is Wednesday.

 

Wednesday is a turkey burger.

 

My throat is full of survivors. 

 

Science says trauma cd be passed down, molecular scar tissue, DNA

cavorting w/war and escape routes and yr dad’s bad dad

 

I’ve inherited this idea to disappear

Oh but you’re a natural performer

 

In the mid 1800s, California wd pay $5 for the head of an NDN and 25¢

per scalp—man, woman, or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds

 

When yr descended from a clever self adept at evading an occupying

force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another

cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister

 

and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood and the

blood and the blood

 

u flush under the hot lights

 

--

 

I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of

South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History

 

btwn two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case of

“traditional” garb from one tribe or another it doesn’t really matter to anyone

 

and that word Natural in Natural History hangs

also History

also Peoples

hangs as in frames

 

it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed

 

as if in some reckless storm

 

but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts—history is so

important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry—

 

Look, I’m sure you really do just want to wear those dream catcher

earrings. They’re beautiful. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, I’m sure

you don’t really think abt us at all. I’m sure you don’t understand the

concept of off-limits. But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music

video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal

annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl

who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over

the past four months wanted to live 50% more

 

I don’t want to be seen, generally, I’m a natural introvert, n I def don’t

want to be seen by white ladies in buttery shawls,

but I will literally die if I don’t scream

 

--

 

An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like

I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston

I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry

 

In my poem, I cdn’t get out of bed for two days after Mike Brown and

Sandra Bland and Charleston

 

me n sweatpants n a new york slice

 

I feel dry as California

where I somehow managed to thrive in a climate of drought for thousands

of years w/o draining the state, yet somehow we were primitive?

 

Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.

 

America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything.

Some ppl will always have to be good sports remain calm

 

Remain Calm

 

Remain Calm

 

Who even wants to go into space? I fucking hate traveling

I’m a weirdo NDN faggot and frankly that limits my prospects

plus it sucks—watching the couples and the string lights

slow-dance in Monbijoupark, to realize

despite history

my own abrupt American body

America that green ghost, been after me for at least a couple hundred

years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a

warm bath

 

Sun breaks upon the Pacific Northwest. Is this a nature poem again