Amalia Tenuta
PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME
from lead in your cave water or in your glass cans of back-up
black-eyed bunker beans of lead that according to the landlord-
provided paperwork peaked around 1974 which I am sure
someone who wrote a thesis on 1974 can tell me that I am
nervous about making money about the opinioned waltzer
who calls himself demand at cotillion claiming tears of risk-
categorizing state data-bodies I imagine take steroids to excel
in the international state-data body competition held every Sun-
day like church in a mosh-pit of meta-data where vulnerability’s
understudy is rolling on molly stomping the stage of Ferris-
wheeling identity the joy above all switch-back blown out
rockslides crushing the wheels of the wagon train of public
anonymity where settlers dredged the closeted cannibal curiosity
of private property WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS reads a sign
centuries later where the broad purple belted shadows beard
my personal wish-fulfillment jalopy I drive around the parking lot
protecting the reader’s desire from lubricous assessments of qualified
case workers gassing you up in the gray Novembered atrium
of enrollment beside the laminated charts of “the gallon man”
a name given to the cystic-quart-ed G-torso-ed walking conversion
heuristic above globes of old ocean and blue-eyed bonfires stately
in the cindering ethno-apocalypses’ custodial closets where specialty
is trained into a certain type of kid whose parents feed him lemons
to prevent scurvy aboard their family trawler the SS REPRODUCTIVITY
where the crew thirsts to manually perceive my changlings by means
of lock-shaped knots and engraved copper periscopes that spy with
my little eye a sandy nothing I name errance landing party ashore errance
that a landing party discovers the island deserted with privatized emergency
rooms where the privatized-deserted-island-physicians ask me questions
about my chest inflammation and my plan’s out-of-deserted coverage
I learn requires a special limited-edition pre-existing condition shaped like
a crowd of shopping carts that wake up early to crimp the cars of podcasters
I am surrounded by species of rope-sizzling gorge-grabbing social relations
unashamed to disclose that I will PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD
IN YOUR HOME for drugs unless you do not have WiFi like my grandfather
who worked for the FBI who demands a water-war with Canada who sends me
t-shirts from Mediterranean giftshops who only remembers Harvard where he
was just a small-town Missouri boy classically underread in the those-who-suck-
on-toes/those-who-do-not-suck-on-toes dialect whose boot you are sucking on
the people coming to get the food are diverse the WSJ editor admires Brooklyn’s pluralistic
stained-glass bread line Wendy’s is running out of meat marooned on suburban
sidewalk supply chains because Ward Parkway accountants hire the Italian
ice cream mafia to PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD
IN YOUR HOME leading me to believe you should never write a poem
about what you did not do cinematic is one word for a poem
that watches itself with a spear covered in shit getting her free flu shot
from the pharmacy there is nothing cinematic about the unblockable spam-email
of survival instead the impluvium’s hawk-freckled cloud-blush
the garden-hand the garden hand’s passing after picking dates
all day on the lord’s estate dismantling whichever productive hierarchy
democracy deliberates with cutaneous counterweights called citizens who
PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME
your home built in the haunted attic of imagination with nothing
but a vanity for enforcing America onto my skin with prisons splattered
in the ivy of abolition metro face-scanners aflame in fare evasion law-
enforcement lined up against the wall exiled to Europa let me
PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME
although I am broke buying Bacardi living with my ass bouncing
on silicone casts of cocks not wanting to cum no more subjective illusion…
I moan to my reflection misapprehension is as socially and historically determinate as…
capital…itself which leads me to believe cum could be considered akin to capital
both accumulating victims of abjured desire a big loss in the community today
as I broke the charger for my vibrator now accepting condolences
now putting pieces of you one might attach with a tack to a staff
and call emerald dream vibe tambourine or submit blueprints of
to the peer-reviewed miscalculations of growing distant called exchange relations
as impermeable to human intervention the violence of PROTECTING YOUR FAMILY
FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME a discovered then thrown out mint-mold
bread end colloquially referred to as a heal implying a hair-ball physiognomy
of bread and linen and the carbon woven abstraction of power’s people-printers
a butterfly net made from hair and bones batting at winged mason jars of petroleum
propelled by nano-pearl bumper cars operated manually
by invisible nano-bumper car drivers with white jump suits
that the lilypad of civil society floats and flashes on everyday like this
the operators reduce their size as some pull levers others apply for grants
to study sub-atomic quantum security studies at the National Institute
of Sub-Atomic Quantum Threat Construction regardless on average
the nationally registered adult citizen consumes anywhere from three to a thousand
every hour but who can really say what they do in there unlike my peer’s parents
who work for a grocery list of government subsidiaries like the Department of Health
or Education or Desire where they spit stimuli into the memory of your great-grandmother’s
vegetable soup recipe known as the real economy where states declare bankruptcy and
PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME pictures taken
in front of an H&R Block but in this high and red isthmus of the real economy
the H&R Block is on fire and the picture is an oil painting hanging in the executive
treehouse of the One World Order where dolphins and octopi sit around smoking
and gambling on the opportunity to kill and let live by being sent to summer camp
the function of which is obviously to extract unwaged labor in the late-setting peach
horizon of human rights charters or to landscape the hiking trails of international aid
campaigns with medium size white boulders just like my first year as a Boy Scout
when a spider was stuck inside my ear and all the scout leaders drove me to the camp’s
hospital where the nurses triaged me in the lobby then sat me on parchment
pounding my head until the dead spider spurted out covering the paper in wax
like ejaculate the nurses were men who aroused me realized me more
than a uniform or camper or care dispenser but enlisted me
in the courteous shark patrol of masculinity at 7AM
when taps played and all the them in training woke to
PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME
Amalia Tenuta is currently studying creative writing and women’s gender and sexuality studies at Emory University. Her work has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine, The Columbia Review, Prolit, SPORAZINE, SURFACES and elsewhere. Her chapbook PATCH NOTES AGAINST PROPERTY is forthcoming with woe eroa. She can be found on Twitter @lumpenqueeer.
