Tommy Pico

My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

Nothing can fall that wasn’t built

except maybe my self-esteem bc I have a hunch that I was born with it

intact but then America came smacked

me across the face said like it

n the sick thing is getting smacked across the face makes me so wet rn

and that’s prolly why poetry, bc in order to get inside

a poem has to break you

the way the only thing more obvious than your body

is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.

The perigee moon haloes the white comforter in a Beyoncé way.

You shine like a bar of soap in the shadows.

The perigee moon is above both of us, in Portland, in NYC, in San

Diego, in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Guaynabo, Sri Lanka

Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight

and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades—

This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.

This white guy asks do I feel more connected to nature

bc I’m NDN

asks did I live like in a regular house

growing up on the rez

or something more salt

of the earth, something reedy

says it’s hot do I have any rain

ceremonies

When I express frustration, he says what? He says I’m just asking as if

being earnest somehow absolves him from being fucked up.

It does not.

He says I can’t win with you

because he already did

because he always will

because he could write a nature

poem, or anything he wants, he doesn’t understand

why I can’t write a fucking nature

poem.

Later when he is fucking

me I bite him on the cheek draw

blood I reify savage lust