Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
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About this ebook
Daniel Borzutzky
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 - Daniel Borzutzky
The Blankest of Times
Managed Diversity
Through predictive analytics I understood the inevitability of the caged-up babies
They keep coffins at the border for when the refugees get too far from home
How many bodies can we fit in a tent or a swimming pool
We can live without the unknown in front of us if we keep enough babies in cages
The cardboard box sleeps one kid comfortably
Two is snugefficientrecommended in times of austerity
Relational values change in relation to market sentiments
This is the danger of having too much access to illegal bodies
Let’s pretend the illegal bodies are bankers
Let’s stick all the bankers in cages
Let’s shove shit in their mouths
Let’s pretend they are eating cryptocurrency
Let’s create a crisis let’s induce inflation
Let’s undervalue the cost of their bodies
I dream of an economy where one arrested immigrant is replaced with one dead banker
I am not responsible for my dreams rather I am responsible for what I do with my dreams
When the sleep medication wears off I am alone with the machines that watch me
The global economy brightens my room with the surveillance of my rotten assets
Systemic Risk
But the people in the dining room
Are busy being born and dying
—Os Mutantes, Panis et Circenses
You can analyze systemic risk
according to how many bodies live or die
If the system fails
the broken bodies
become invisible and/or hypervisible
The people are being born and dying
They are enacting the invisibility
of the security system
through the exhibition of their naked bodies
I eat corrupted data
to keep my skin
from becoming transparent
I would rather be
a defect of culture
than a defect of data or character
What is not observed
grows more visible
in relation to the strength of the surveillance
It’s better to deprive
a few million people of food
than to pull the plug on the global economy
If the consumers don’t want your product
then teach them the meaning of love
Poem #1022
There is not much excess
and what there is is barely perceptible
the blank ones disappear from our vision
no one notices until
there is a dramatic decrease in surplus value
the war is born
and the blank ones disappear again
but really their disappearance is subjective
some see no one
while others see everyone
for some the extermination of the cancer is
inseparable from the decreation of the city
others associate the decreation
with an unstoppable flow of leakage
while others associate the decreation
with falling rates of profit
and the barely perceptible
appearance of the human body
out of the dead refugee sprouts
a breathing poem
out of the dead soldier sprouts
a breathing poem
out of the dead city sprouts
a breathing poem
but when the city disappears
so do the poems
and when the poems disappear
the dead are assassinated
picture a heart covered in dust and
picture a poem sprouting out of it
picture a heart covered in dust
and picture a child chasing it
picture a bullet that kills a child
and picture the soldier who tosses the child into the sea
the soldier kisses the earth and says
it’s not my fault the people are being born and dying
the pastor calls out the names of the children to the congregants
to each name they respond
dead
Day #423
The beach is burning in the middle of the city and they tell
Us the lake is not dead but we know it has
Disappeared into the chemical blankness and
The sand is full of disease and
The water is full of petroleum and the water is full of bodies
With cadmium and arsenic in their ears
They have lead in their mouths they
Are falling out of the sky or they are bones in the earth
They are clinging to something they are clinging to each other
They are clinging to the air to the trees to the breath to the night
And youare a wounded shoulder in the hypnosis of the emergency
You are shrapnel and inexhaustible love
You wear a mold-mask of shame
You see shame in the growth of the willow trees in the locust trees in the
red cedars
Your bones are martyrs and on the other
Side of the beach there is water but you can’t see it
They will not let you near it and the waves are frozen
And you feel them
Like fat or hair or dead skin on your body
And there is the irritating hum of time and death
And the living who are dying of so much living
Of so much time and death
They are