Girls on Film

It was raining in Das Capital
At the intersection of many circles
You ask do I feel watched
I look at the wet parts of the street
I used to film myself eating
food, among other things. My mother
studied art history.
Did you reck' the earth did you learn to read did you
[meaning-making activity] [handheld device]
I'll tell you what I want
What I really really want
A more injurious cognition
A sword like word
Change in the watercourse           an algal drift
I used to film myself eating
And watch back for angularity
Now (cough cough) I'm sick
Recovering from language I inherited
[Silted water. Pale resplendent shroud. A year
is not an event. I watch you climb into enfolding
darkness. Small, like a story about yourself.]
Whose gun?
I was hoping for metaphor
What gives?
In trying to verse a fluctuant gender
I instead service rough slats of conjugal
Logic propped against an army reserve
Mind the curve
I used to be a filmed domestic event
Watching towels fold
My employer quotes the inscription
Above the metal gates of Auschwitz:
WORK MAKES US FREE
But in German, which I was studying
Poorly not at all acquiring
And in my struggle to understand
His words as they met me
And how I should now act
I became a loose composition
Of elements unable to grasp
The wiped-down edge of articulation
Searching for a livable environment
I recede
into an interiority
Improbable and petulant
As if painted mid-seminar by Mary Cassatt
That sleeped arrangement,
The fatuous buckle on the foot
Of a child whose class is determinable
By her tartan
Sets fire to the Japanese footbridge
And in that periodized refusal a color
Whose purpose registers a house in two dimensions
Locatable and partially synthetic
I am trying to explain difficulties
I used to film myself dancing
Beneath superimposed Emily Dickinson
I used to live next to Sappho
Pass myself off as various women
Assert the liquid mercurial
Resisting affective war technologies
I smash the lute
That self-negation
Could have been an email
Rodney has the mind of an engineer
That's how he cuts into paper
I try to preserve artifice
What the image unmakes during capture
Sometimes I do encounter the same river twice
Opening on the recording eye
Of a waterborne bird
I wave to its adjustable flight