by Chris Campanioni
It is getting harder and harder to tell the colonized from the colonizers. Today one wore blue, the other white. Three days earlier the outfits were reversed. Who was it who was it that said revolutions repeat themselves, the same fantasies played out by different characters, on a revolving stage. It’s true, too, on the television, where everything that happens happens twice or not at all. I have never used a blow dryer. I have never used an alarm clock. I have never used protection. What is it within me that desires catastrophe, and did I, like all things, inherit this?
A student speaks of the one private jet every influencer entered, at the beginning of the pandemic, during shelter in place mandates and travel prohibitions, in order to craft the illusion of mobility. The jet has never left the ground. Sometimes I still imagine it there, permanently arrested on the runway, emptied of fuel, with neither a pilot nor a crew, without a destination, nowhere in which to arrive, but for this uninspired photo-op inside a lavish cabin, where faces that are not yours pose with a fake airline’s sumptuous offerings. People give up their bodies for this. The beautiful game. I am watching with my legs laid out on the couch, as I prepare another seminar on overhearing, or even better, mishearing, unless I’m only there in memory, which is another kind of presence, another kind of death.
Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I’ll rotate the page sideways, and begin again, waiting for the moment the horizontal lines catch up with the vertical lines and how I can’t soon distinguish between the two or can I. And if I run out of room, I’ll flip the page over. And if I run out of room, I’ll flip my hand over, and use my palm. And if I run out of room, I’ll use my uncanny capacity to forget.
I begin as I always do, by copying out the sounds that originate in the body. I arrived here in the same elevator you did, contorting my form beyond recognition as we each jostled what we came with to procure a single breath. I remember the stool I’d used to help mama wash the dishes. I remember running my hand along every shelf and dresser drawer, every countertop, as the lamp above my head gave off its unnatural glow, and I could see the extent of time collected on these most familiar objects through the dust encircling the air; the art of feeling useful. This promises to be a long list of short things. I know the age of the vertebrate is much older than the age of the mind and the heart. From sitting at lengths like this, hunched over so I can write more quickly than I can think—a rush I crave, since all this latent language, these delicious non-words, could drop at any moment—my lower back may be irrevocably fucked. If I require great abandon to do this task, I also require weekly Babylonian spa treatment. I think of my massages the way I consider the cadence and vibrations of the text. Beginnings are often tedious in their elaborate preparations, endings so contrived. How to achieve the intention of a middle?
When I enter class, everyone is already seated, engaged in their stage whispering, audible from my seat in the audience but too muffled to distinguish words or phrases. What does it take to form a smile a real smile. She has never told me. Later, after the seminar on overheard things (misheard things), I’ll pay my respects to the crescent moon on my short walk toward Fulton, passing all the scaffolding and shuttered offices, the post no bills signs that predestine renovation. By the time you read this, there’ll be magnificent new storefronts; the crescent moon will be full; my vertebrate will require a brace; the studio made to appear as an aircraft will be a parking lot, which is what it was before it started selling private jet visits for sixty-four US dollars an hour. Ralph H. had to wait 15-20 minutes after the occasion had already begun because they started repainting the set after the booking before us. Gaylord S. had to reframe their shots in post to avoid showing the damage to the set and furniture, which was dirty and visibly torn. Winnie L. praised the extremely pleasant nature of the host and said the place was ideal for what we needed. Due to increasing demand, reservations for the studio in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles were soon being scheduled simultaneously, so influencers would not unfrequently be caught in the background of their rivals’ stories, unexpected cameos or an involuntary collaboration to each Go Live. My information keeps outdating.
One has the feeling of having lived through an old script. Destiny—where am I in all that? The national flag drapes around the human body as if a blanket, shrouding all but the jutting throat, the open lips, whose mouth is screaming, when I think to look: fellow travelers of other people’s revolutions, I think, other people’s conquests of a home that is nevertheless not their own. More flags, each patterned according to a different schema, launched above each head like the mast of a ship. Ribbons of sun flaring onto the pitch as the day continues its march. Sooner or later, I think, as I turn my gaze from the screen, everyone switches sides, if not also uniforms, like every artifact of barbarism, like the barbarians that were so called because the Greeks couldn’t figure out what sounds—what mumbling—were being uttered in their presence. Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I’ll mute the volume and try to decipher your words from sight, remembering, after all, that anything that can be read can be misread and anything that can be misread can be passed along. A murmur in the sequence of unbending code. I would ask if pain changes you, but it isn’t really a question, is it.
Chris Campanioni is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays and Latin American Literature Today. Recent books include a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023) and his debut poetry collection, Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024).