Airplane / About Me Sonnet.

1. Hi, my name is Craig. I’m flying on a plane from SFO to LAX. We’re about mid flight and the sun is setting off to my right and what that looks like from here is a thick magic-marker-blue line right at the horizon, with some pink above that and the Sierras beneath.

2. Brat has been on me for a while to write something for the website, but I have a singular interest and I have trouble pronouncing it. 

3. For example. I’ve never been happy with description in poetry. Give me the solidity of Creeley’s “woods of small trees” over anything by Mark Doty. Or just a kiss, and an unwrapping. And Wittgenstein’s unutterable.

4. Lately I’ve been thinking about the masculine, and what it means to be a man. I think this was in part prompted by the move to San Francisco. Sitting behind me, there’s a man talking to a stranger’s child, and without getting into specifics what I would like to say is that the man seems to be seeking validation from the child. Someone told me the only real men in San Francisco are gay men. 

5. Sudden turbulence. Must’ve hit a rock.

6. Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten into the bad habit of tacking on “I think” or “maybe” to the ends of notes that I write at work.

7. Crazy!

8. There’s this carwash near the university in Berkeley that’s kind of fascinating.  I was sitting across from it, in the park, watching and it’s this big circus. Cars are parked and strewn about in every which direction, blocking each other-in and shit, and yet everybody seems to know what they’re doing, including the customers, who participate and point to things that need to be buffed out. My car is filthy but I would have no idea how to get my car cleaned there, even after watching. Now think about how many jiffy lubes you see these days. 

9. I remember spending afternoons as a kid in the warehouse of my father’s business, driving the forklift in circles or dirtying my hands on the oiled bearings of a nail gun, and how I'd touch the calendars and the pin-ups. Smudge smudge smudge. 

10. When was the last time someone told you to grow up?

11. I’m part of a tribe of people who, aboard airplanes, just sit. And wait. Sometimes to cross time zones you first have to travel through boredom, and you get right into the autumn-smelly birth pastures of creativity and self-delusion. This is why anyone can write when they are a guest in the home of a friend. 

12. I repeat my name is Craig. I am feeling a little weightlessness in my feet as we make our descent and I am thinking about a woman. 

13. Now here’s the part of the sonnet where the heroic couplet might be, and I don’t know what to do with that. I have a master of fine arts degree in poetry but this is my first sonnet and I am new here.

14. I am going to sit here until everyone else exits the plane and then I'm going to get up and I'm going to walk the aisle like I've got nowhere to be because it's true. There's that little bocadillo of night you get as you exit onto the jetbridge and it's going to be fantastic.

fanmail: o amor amargo

I have an obsession. I won't lie.


There was a period in my life when I used to deny my desires. It lasted six months, cuando todavia era chismoso. Tenia un amante autista. I didn't have the right to touch myself. We split like a hair. This was right before I left Mexico City for Santiago. The two events are related.

I scrunch in D.F. My apartment on Calle Bucareli. Days pace past the anterior window of Café La Habana. Antecedent lovers set no precedent to this fizzle. I breathe dark coffee. July girls in full blossom beauty. Sigo pensando en sus ojos bizcos, o cómo los brasileños lo dicen, vesga. A plaque of glial cells named Chile. I thought about going back in March when I wasn't alone.

First reaction is to breach myself from everything that's a reminder. I understand the problem with that now. Everything I was before is fractured by cross-glare. The rupture isn't with her so much as my capability as an individual to exist autonomously. My penis, though rude (of her) as it may seem, plugged her mouth and no longer belongs to me. I don't masturbate. I don't experience myself in a sexual way. I'm a second by second afterthought.

First to return is my taste for salted meat. I smell charque in my dreams. My mind travels home to Chile. It draws back when I think of cueca. Great fear of ridicule, typical of a Chilean, subsides. I am a Mexican. A revolution is like a fever, my desire the sting of a pimple that is past-ready to be popped. April May and June pass and intense pressure is building behind my sockets. July brings back just socialisme. Bad news for Allende. I brood for giant pinenuts.

She met a truck driver in March, a little more than a month before my birthday. I'm twenty years old. I feel an intense pyrexia. Thirty days pass. Eight weeks. Three months.

I sit in Café La Habana. I watch Rosario serve the customers. Tabletop is crotch height. I rub against it gripping porcelain. I close my eyes. Heat rises to my head. My fever is delirium. I rub furiously. I call Rosario. The fever is reaching it's peak. I rub furiously. Allende has locked himself in the palace. He has given his last speech. I am thinking of a cross-eyed lover for the last time. I stop rubbing against the tabletop. I bid Rosario for a coffee. Pinochet orders the strike. I place my hand in my pants. The troops move in. It is exactly twenty-eight years before airplanes demolish the world trade center. Allende places his hand on the revolver. Rosario places her hand on my shoulder.




The revolution is over. The pimple pops. My desire denial comes to an end. Allende is dead. Pinochet dealt a hard-blow. I must return to Chile immediately.




I have a penchant for letters


in the same way I have an obsession with love. I do not believe that love is restricted to eroticism. I believe one can love an ideal much more passionately than a pair of butt cheeks (not really). I believe this fanmail letter is the product of love. I thank you, the loyal writer, and hope you don't mind me sharing your spirit:

Manifesto



after Roberto Bolaño



You will grow sick. In the rooms

where you have loved, you will remain alone.

Stay in bed. Let there be no light

but the light of the poem

reflected in the eyes of the beloved.

Who is absent. Who is always absent,

if you’re thinking ahead. If you’re not

thinking far enough ahead now,

you’re still alive, and poetry

wants nothing of you. Just as you want nothing

of yourself. You will think of objects

as you would in a dream, their multiplicity

of lives. You will attend dinner parties

but leave in the middle of the main course. You won’t

say anything, not even to your friends,

and from the window in the bathroom

you will exit into your new life

as a visceral realist. You’ll be given a uniform,

though no one will see you wearing it.

But you’ve got to, in order to write.

You will consider publishing under pseudonyms

of the opposite sex, but what’s the point? No one

knows you anymore, not even your own

mother. Which is what she says on the answering machine.

You will stand outside time and own

only worthless things, like answering machines.

It’s not monasticism, this solitude…

You can still go out to bars.

Your life has simply gotten smaller.

It’s the size of a crocodile’s eye,

the tie on the waist-apron

of the woman from Ukraine

who brings you coffee, the scent

of her perfume. It might be enough.

But in the evenings, from the window

of your apartment, your bare shoulders

will catch a sliver of light

from the full moon and in this way

you will be recuperated by poetic clichés.

But don’t cry. Visceral realists don’t cry.

- Gregory Solano