Sandra Simonds




The Community Garden

as panopticon fried steak: what happens in the community stays
caught and dour.
What happens is an antibiotic injected into the leg
of a limp chicken under the dry sun.

You lick the antibiotic off your dinner plate
with your black tongue
and then black milk drips from your third nipple
because now you are a dog.

This is why no one will allow you your bizarre sexual practices.
Because you are a dog.

The heart is like metal that slams
into an ice field, a closed
system of opening gills; I see you walking across the ice field
towards me holding a chicken or steak knife
or the fried heart of a small mammal.

The fish swim to the center of the earth and burn up.
Even they cannot get away
from their enormous blood or geology.

Everyone gets old and is replaced by these

tremendously fueled fish hormones
swimming to the center of the earth.

Some people have sex—they exist.
They cut each other’s necks

and then they kiss. They kiss
their kisses into a closing system of gills

and then you hear something splash.

Space exists.
It exists on the other side of their chicken water kiss.







The Community

is so sick it cannot die.
Because it’s half ghost, half commerce

and all it does all day long
is inject its DNA sequence
into your DNA sequence

thereby allowing you to
manifest all of the symptoms of syphilis
without ever having
been exposed to the bacteria

because this isn’t the year 1765 and you
aren’t an aristocrat living in some
stone castle and I’m not

this sickly lady who’s going
to give you syphilis even though
you’re the one who’s supposed

to give it to me so when
you’re on your deathbed you’re not

going to ask me not to haunt you
even though I can’t not haunt you because I’m
just that obsessed with being

vindictive because, deep down,
I hate people
and you represent people because you
look like a dog

and there’s nothing worse
than watching a lost dog
trying to find the cemetery.








The Community

has one desire:
To be a community.
To commerce around desire,
to commiserate.

We often talk of communal
Living, of design spaces
that are white and stretch

infinity across
the community like
a death sheet.

Like beds. Like weak
arousal. Like
the infrastructures

of masochism. Like moons
that resolve age-old
questions.

Remember me?
I walked across the grocery store
parking lot to talk to you.

All ashy community
Giving.

The community lectures
to cross
out the space
where uncleanness
comes.

Spots such as: the moon, the sun,
orchids, crematoriums.








The Community

has never been about communicating and yet, it is so syntactical.
To err grammatically

is one of the only things that would seem
terribly tactless, to retract

a claim of kinship

another wind farm

in the air raid design space
that we have build with our willpower.

You could never tell
me you loved me
or that you wanted
To love me

in this white place

or the design space would seal off
with you trapped inside
and then gas would be pumped

into the world outside the cube
so you would have to sit there

in your little white design space cube
holding a little white
plastic flower
maybe telling it all of your secrets

like the fact that you never
wash your underwear

until you died.

Better not.