Swayne - Poetry

Mollie Swayne

MAYONNAISE

When I met the poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten for lunch near Washington Square Park recently, he ordered a hamburger, and asked the waiter to hold the aioli. When the food arrived, it was clear that his request had not been followed. After a brief, disappointed examination of the bun, Moten, who recently became a professor at N.Y.U. after a few years at the University of California, Riverside, found an idea.

“I think mayonnaise—actually, sorry, this is stupid, this is crazy,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said.

“I think mayonnaise has a complex kind of relation to the sublime,” he said. “And I think emulsion does generally. It’s something about that intermediary—I don’t know—place, between being solid and being a liquid, that has a weird relation to the sublime, in the sense that the sublimity of it is in the indefinable nature of it.”

“It’s liminal also,” I offered.

“It’s liminal, and it connects to the body in a certain way.”

“You have to shake it up,” I said. “You have to put the energy into it to get it into that state.”

“Anyway,” Moten said, “mostly I just don’t fucking like it.”

—“Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present,” New Yorker article by David Wallace, April 30, 2018

What’s life supposed to look like?

nothing’s been precarious for a while

I’m at what might be the deepening

after the boredom and the fury

ease, almost peace

this is how my days will go

in a straight line

and I will crave less and less

I don’t yearn anymore

or yearning looks different

this is it!

I have become what I was

always becoming

and now I get to be it!

I have been birthed

except this time it was me

and everyone else

doing the birthing

it looks different, feels

different but I’m mainly glad about it

Now it’s depressing again

today I tried to write a poem

but about what?

looked into the empty corners of my routine

and found just a bunch of lint and a paper clip

and a shrivelly old grape

I try and hold it up

learn what the lint has to teach me

nothing

today it’s just a fucking piece of lint

I don’t want to want what I want

or at least I want to want less of it

I have a friend who believes in God

in an old-timey Southern way

that’s all wrapped up with who

she is as a person

I wonder if it feels like I think it might

like there is no place on earth you can walk

where you will ever feel lonely

Now it’s a Sunday in spring

my lover is downstairs playing the piano

there is a spot in the house where I can look

down on the inside of the instrument, the part

in his hair and the pooch of his stomach

my friend’s mother is a professor of anatomy

he tells us bodies are not all the same inside

three years at my desk and I have a typing muscle

the bulge at the back of my right bicep

we are made, and made again

I am relearning the art of making

things look like other things

I open my mouth and flowers come out

flowers open their mouths and ticks come out

the ticks scream buttons

gravy oozes from the buttonholes

so on and so forth so that I am weeping

from the effort of it

—happy tears today

you can imagine me like this:

lifting a monster truck tire above my head

on top of a hill when the sun is fiercest

straight yelling into the heat