poems
Marie Buck
The Streamlined Version
There’s no additional text,
There’s no water on July 2nd
beginning at around 9:02 pm and for about two hours.
What?
Are we going that way?
I thought about school for a million years.
One has to imagine
a wish list that
isn’t really a wish list more
like a dread list
but you could locate it,
if you wanted,
in the past: all the bad
things that have happened, the situations
you’ve barely gotten out of
like, say, rural isolation;
proximity to loved ones’
anti-social behavior
caused by mental health crises;
housing scrambles; no roommate
situation that will accept
cats; toxic air in the
apartment; unwell person
you know professionally,
and do not love,
with a grudge against you;
you’ve gotten into the program
but must move 12 hours away
to a more expensive town, and
not enough money;
merging poorly on the highway;
a loose dog that is somehow above
you, on a roof, barking angrily down;
guy in a car jerking off and trying
to follow you and it’s 3 a.m.
Being really sad. Not enough sunlight
in the winter. Being really happy and
then almost drowning in a rip current.
Being slightly melancholic, a little stoned,
and almost drowning in a rip current.
A woman runs and screams help and
you sprint with her across the street to help
and you do.
Sometimes you feel really embarrassed for no reason at all.
None of it you can even point to more than right
now; if there were a God surely they’d say
“I’ll give you something to cry about.” There, full
of adrenaline, in the water, briefly entertaining,
But there it is.
There it will be;
you’ll never get out of it,
it’s true.
Travis
He’s a unit.
Travis is a unit,
oh my god, Travis.
I felt so good
when he told Kendall that I looked jacked.
I’m going to take it to the grave.
No; not like that, I mean I’m going to take it with me.
Like I’m going to hold onto it.
I’m going to take it to the grave.
Whatever.
I heard that he’s moving back to New York soon.
He went back home
to save money and stuff
but he’s going to come back.
I mean that’s why he wears muscle shirts.
He’s huge.
Oh my god,
here’s his Instagram.
He’s huge.
He’s a unit.
I wish he came to the office.
I’m sure he’s in Boston.
He’s an inspiration.
Travis!
Mark
My one piece of advice
is to stay away from Mark right now.
Because if he’s rubbing people the wrong way
and they associate him with you—
I mean, don’t go down with that sinking ship.
Look out for Number 1.
Does that make sense? That Mark is not going
to look out for you?
Disconnect from him. Immediately.
Get off that sinking ship.
I can introduce you to Rebecca; that’s
an opportunity for you.
Please start to look out for Number 1.
Disconnect from Mark.
Immediately. He’s a coward,
not a leader.
I have your back but I don’t have his;
he’s an idiot.
You have a better relationship with Lana
than you do with Mark, right?
If Mark had the choice between saving you
and his own ass? Who do you think he’s
going to choose? If he tells people,
“she’s not communicating with me”
then you have a chance to network up.
I know you don’t want to, but.
It’s an option. I’m going to stop.
because I don’t want to give you
advice, just perspective. And I
don’t want you to go down
with a sinking ship; I’ve seen it
too many times. A difference between
you and many of the people in this department
is that you are marketable.
And a lot of these other people aren’t.
Mark isn’t.
He’s not going to call people and fight
on your behalf. He’s going to blame you for stuff.
He’s not going to say, oh, she’s a good
communicator. He could be telling you one thing
and doing the opposite. I don’t trust that guy.
You need to have really good judgment
in that role and he does not. He has the opposite
of that. I’m not trying to give you advice. Just perspective.
Disconnect from Mark.
An Identical Twin
How lucky you both are.
How lucky you both are.
On a scale of 1 to 11, how lucky
would you say you are?
That’s right:
A 12.
Oh, feel your hand: it’s like silk.
It’s like silk with flowers. That’s
how lucky you are.
Food
I hear someone say they’re so lucky
which is the sweetest of all the things you can say.
We did a survey of parks
and want it to be a survey of pleasure and it is:
sometimes eating and drinking decadent things
is a metaphor for a feeling of plenty;
some people hate this in a poem but I would
argue that the feeling is only that in real life,
these slices of mortadella are delicious therefore
I will never want for more; I can’t picture anything
on my tongue beyond this good cheese, or a sweet
made of many varieties of egg, egg cooked at various
consistencies and sweetened; if we have the money
for the fancy thing it must mean we’ll never be so bad
off that we can’t afford the shitty thing, is I think
where the brain goes with it. The parks are all true;
I don’t think they are a metaphor for anything, or they’re
a more trustworthy metaphor. Or the particular meeting
of nature and convenience: the bathrooms, the bar, the
available arepas or French fries indicate that there is a social net.
The world’s there for you if you do your part, a bit of government and
some that’s just from God. This meeting lets you lay there till late,
walk back salty and a little cold, and the bags are heavy. There is not much
of a threat of having to do anything else, you know.
What you have to do—even in the moment it’s like you’re being documented.
Or you don’t need to be. You could do this
a few more times,
as much as you can.
You can stop if you want to,
you can keep going.
You can paddle further out
or feel sad or nervous.
You can get self-conscious of what an asshole you are.
You can realize you’re a nervous type of person,
a burden for others to be around sometimes maybe.
You can feel like you’re being tested;
you can really feel like garbage, like part of you is here
and part of you is not here,
but you’ll still have your body, since it’s overwhelmed this place.
Someone will come up
and tell you about an endangered species
of very shy bird, and we’ll all agree
we’re shy, the birds are shy, the birds are offput
by our presence and we’re offput by the presence of the person
telling us about the birds, who seems offput by the fact that they have to do this.
They seem offput by their own presence; we’re all so shy, a convention of beings
advocating for all the other people there to not have to be aware of them.
I mean, everyone here is sad about changes over time.
Once at the beach at Fort Tilden it rained, and my group stayed through it.
Another group did too, the sun came out, my group looked at the other
group from a distance, and everyone raised their hands in the air and cheered,
victorious that we had waited it out and now had the beach to ourselves.
Sometimes you run into people you know. Once, you told me, you got a blowjob
behind that sand dune; once I got scared of a wave at this part of the beach.
We run into a friend, who tells us about the art project of another friend, the project
is for the shy species of bird, and it’s a speaker inside a rock in the dunes, so that
the rock makes the sound that the shy birds make. I am glad to keep walking
past the bird area entirely, the party of shy people. I have a picture of you from
this spot; I took a picture of the sunset the first time we came here, despite that I wanted
to take a picture of you but was feeling shy, and you said, “don’t you want to take a picture
of me?” and then I did.
Licking
We were trying to con people at the Cheesecake Factory into thinking we knew the CFO.
And we sort of did; it wasn’t a lie.
Do you like Olive Garden?
I mean, be careful how you answer.
My old roommate’s boyfriend at the time’s sister married into a family where the dad was pretty high up at Cheesecake Factory.
The wait staff wouldn’t believe us; they weren’t having it.
I was really shit-faced though.
And we’re gradually improving, all the time, becoming wiser as we age.
What’s the difference with the oat milk?
I think it’s made of oats, that’s why.
My dad was trying to con the owner and say that we were related to the CFO.
They wouldn’t believe us, that we were related to the CFO somehow but not by blood.
The quesadilla had mozzarella cheese in it.
It had this smokiness to it, it was breaded.
And I was drunk; everything tasted good to me that night.
If the quality of the chicken was bad, I never would have known.
It was an eggplant parm.
I Wanted to Give a Gift But It Was Like a Sort of Coffin
All my hyper friends are programmers.
I mean he’s not a programmer but.
You know what I mean.
All these hyper guys
just like to figure one thing out,
then another, then another.
And that makes them very employable.
This is more dangerous than us shimmying up the ladder here.
This is more dangerous than us just getting back in the boat.
Dude, the fact that that happened
right in front of the people who were there
to protect that area—that is the funniest fucking thing.
You couldn’t write it.
And this is another one.
These are some other things.
They got stuck out by some reservoir.
They actually had to call the fire trucks.
This is like a real thing that happened;
I mean it is serious because sometimes
there’s like this helicopter.
These are the people; you can tell it’s not our clothes.
There’s this little cement ledge here; you can see our clothes.
You can see it’s just smooth sailing.
And we’re like, dude, just let us get in our boat.
I mean, this is the spot.
There’s something historic about your experience.
Ah, well.
It’s true I guess.
This is four years ago now.
At the end of the day he ended up paying.
I had to threaten, though.
It didn’t end well;
this guy was a shit.
And it’s actually super fucked.
No, this was crazy.
He wanted to do something crazy.
He made a really bad decision.
If I did something fucked up I’m gonna own it;
I’m not gonna pawn it off on somebody else.
That’s where character shows.
And he was hanging off the side of the boat.
And he flew off into the water.
I think I sent it to him?
You sent it to him?
It was on the roof in front of millions of people.
It would’ve been tragic.
What a story.
I’ve never heard that.
Some stupid shit.
Like when Kyle jumped into the East River.
We were drinking.
It was at Katie’s birthday.
Somewhere near the East River.
Gross water, we don’t know what’s down there.
You could jump down there and land on a fucking metal rod.
Three of us were over there.
I’ll never forget.
He lands,
and it’s just like a plume of shit, like, the smell.
And we all ran over and he emerges; he’s like swimming.
And he’s sick for a while and it was like, well,
he was actually in hella good shape; he was playing college soccer.
And antibiotics don’t work on him.
I guess he had a lot of ear infections as a kid.
He was on study abroad in Spain and was like super sick.
I mean super dangerous.
No one knows what’s under there.
Happiness
There’s nothing to make you feel better.
Better means: I am gonna sit here at this table
and tell you I had two pieces of that birthday cake,
like: that was a big beautiful birthday cake, I
had two pieces of that big beautiful birthday cake.
Yes, I mean, I had two pieces of it, I went back for seconds.
It was a really good cake! I’m not sure where she got it but
I wound up having two pieces of it. I couldn’t stay away, I went
back for seconds. Did you hear? I said, I was just saying to her, by
the end of the night I wound up having two pieces of that cake.