Theories of address
by Lena Rubin
two men meet every friday
at the lesbian coffeeshop
down the street and yell
at each other
not out of anger
their yelling constitutes
a different kind of
relation, one I cannot enter
their words, both esoteric
and magnificent, most likely
refer to software
we can’t get too hung
up on semantic closure,
one says
we have to assume, the other says
that the obfuscation scheme
is successful
sorry to get stuck on this, one
says, but the fact that you’re a man
is sufficient
it’s a sufficient input
❦
address is a shield
a defense
a way of speaking about the world
without speaking to it
I misread “shield”
as “child”
address is “My voice thrown”
into “my Other littler
self on my own knee”
❦
a hand written epistle
was tucked into the novel
my communist boyfriend gave me
after invoking me via
my first initial
he goes on to enumerate
his own good fortune
in the year 2017
I am on the list too
denoting that I have
happened to him
I exist within his
written marketplace
of events
I am last on the list
to emphasize, I imagine,
my importance to him
yet what I read now
through the lens of time
is myself as an afterthought
to his life
myself as “beloved addressee,”
being a chance for him
to steal written time
to celebrate himself
is a letter always an artifact
of our own self-address
through the prism of “you”
in the epistle generally speaking
we address the other
in order to widen a field
and approach this wideness,
in order to speak of the world,
as I have said, without
actually speaking to it
❦
little “you” is a buffer
for the magnitude of
the big “you,”
which is life,
which is the world,
which is time
❦
after the breakup
I talked incessantly
vibrant, special, exposed
all the language I had funneled
into the closed love circuit
now pouring out everywhere
❦
the television
is a falsely open text
it addressed me in childhood
when my leisure time overlapped
with my parents’ working hours
I favored a program where women
competed to be the most beautiful
in pictures as well as walking
and were coached on poses
and facial expressions
Until season four of America’s Next Top Model,
Tyra Banks would spend an hour with every girl
who got kicked off the show, talking with them in private
The producers asked her to stop this
what happened in season four
was that Tyra lost her shit
at a girl named Tiffany
“never in [her] life
having “yelled at a girl
like this before”
but having been
similarly yelled at:
“when my mother yells
like this,” says Tyra,
“it’s because she loves me”
the fantasy of bearing witness
to a totally unscripted moment
within the pure commercial image
address as real & raw as the unfinished
New Jersey Turnpike
concrete just poured,
leaked into or from mother writ large
our speech always returns to,
cannot escape from, mother
had I moved closer to the screen?
had I gone through it?
❦
I read a self help book about chronic pain
the author’s a heretic MD
spends most of the book burning
himself on the stake
he also explains that if one suffers
from pain one should speak
to one’s own mind
one should acknowledge
that one’s own person is producing pain
one should say to one’s self
“stop that,” say
“stop producing that pain”
❦
when Joan Didion
talks about the cat that shimmers
in a schizophrenic or
LSD-like way
I ask my students if they see
images in their mind
some people raise their hands
other people look around confused
I ask if people instead
hear words in their mind
some people raise their hands
other people look around confused
❦
my novel
is a physio-biological entity
with its own aura
which can be fractured by
other people's words
when I become too porous
it’s like I’m letting other people
write my book for me
that Derridean sense of
two hands (or
more) writing,
one erasing the other
❦
“the book is like speech,”
someone says, “because it excludes
the things that are not said”
“speech being about
what is not real,”
says joanie
hiya describes the poem as
“a metrical realignment
of everything”
“colorless language
technology… felt like a virus,”
says natasha
“this kind of experiment is too
hollow for me” admits nick
I no longer remember
what my friends were referring to
I only know their words have become
the primary text