from "Roses" by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb | Basic Needs | Rescue Press | October 2021 | 97 Pages
from “Roses”
Oh my god, they say. How we trust
The temperature that makes this good
However long I postpone, most of sight is from here
The whole time is pretending and confession
He is not pleased with the likeness
For a moment to look good I hold my glass away
Putting ourselves between ourselves
In this loft that is ours for a unit of time
I am stripped of the old grievance
I want to be closer to the life of me
He is going to be the life of me
Misha, in a towel, drawing this
Act of relinquishing meaning
Turning to beauty our potential beauty
Smoke letting and the alarm goes and goes
Standing there, I sear the filet like this
You could die
Like this you could eat
We forage in the cold woods behind the monastery
And an axe appears by the river
He says I wish I had an axe
A river
We send little boats down
He watches and I go like a boat
To write a line in wet gold
On the black paper he has folded
But how can we hate the past
To make the present more than the past
They forget about the work we had to do he says
The history of it
All this territory
Anything that’s happened in us
The drive is a double image
And he fingers the holes
My knee-highs are ripping
It couldn’t be a less ordinary day to leave
An inelegant fall
In a November of strange trees
All of this so that we may be
To be me of someone else beside me
To feel better I try to hear what he feels so eternally
Abbreviating the street, I say I am at the corner of Mad
The right to park is a cost to us
Everything is an immense cost
Money
Money
I draw an orange ticket
I am careless with how I place things
I have been late a matter of months and so reduced
All of our cars are trying to arrive
And we are asked to determine so quickly
The capacity to support the web of life
But not to forget is to fall in with time
What I need I still often forget
Fast approaching the limits
Like the ecological struggle
Like the base of the superstructure
Let us wait to see, she says
How you feel the heat is not true
If I weren’t myself
If I were her
If it came to what I owe
She would not accept try
I will not talk about a reduction in what you owe
I have been trying
I have been responding, says the landlord
We haven’t heard
Where is the heat
Where is it
Used with permission of Rescue Press.
© 2021 Vanessa Jimenez Gabb.
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of Images for Radical Politics (Rescue Press, 2016). Of Colombian and Belizean descent, she is from and lives in Brooklyn, NY.