0278ji

[0278ji]

Duga benih patah hati lagi, tahu begini.

Andai bisa, aku ingin selalu menjadi tenang diriuhnya isi kepalamu. Aku ingin menjadi pelipur di setiap duka laramu. Aku juga ingin menjadi angin sejuk yang berhembus di setiap gersang yang menyelimutimu.

Sepertimu yang selalu berhasil meredam ribut badaiku dengan lembut. Sepertimu yang selalu mampu melahirkan bintang-bintang pada malamku yang kelam. Sepertimu yang selalu bisa meyakinkan segala wujud ragu pada diriku.

Aku adalah seorang berkepala batu dan kau adalah pemilik hati yang begitu luas.

Tiap kali pikiranku bergelut dengan segala prasangka, baik atau buruk, aku merasa semua ini tak akan adil bagimu. Lambat laun mungkin akan membuatmu menyerah sebab sikapku yang melelahkan. Sebab aku pun lelah dengan diriku sendiri. Aku seringkali terjebak pada kerumitan yang sulit terurai.

Dan pada kemungkinan terburuk yang mungkin saja terjadi, sehingga menjadikan langkah kita tak lagi searah. Sungguh, bahagiamu masih menjadi satu harap yang paling lantang ku sampaikan kepada Tuhan.

[0278ji]

The water cuts out white shampoo still clogs my hair.

The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don't have the virus, it's a bitch.

The building across from the cemetery cals itself life storage.

My little brother was shot, i tell the barista who asks how things have been, and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assumen, or inspire, but I take it literally, as i am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let's cook tonight, those are for you, stephen. You won't come to me in my dreams, so I must communicate by other avenues.

A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly's “Fifty Days at Iliam”

—a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”— and asks: Have you seen this? It's at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

If i have, I can't remember, though i did visit with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn't touch and could.

You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes, in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son. Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.

I've studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands. Of course I would. Each finger, even. To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.

If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape. Homer's similes, I've been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.

"Let Achilles cut me down,/ as soon as I have taken my son into my arms and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind's new refrain in the pharmacy queue, in the train's rattling frame.

The same friend and I discuss a line by

Zbigniew Herbert "where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad."

It's nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference: The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire.

We see double.

You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.

Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red, only to learn the title is "Boats at Sea." It's like how sometimes I forget you're gone. But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.

And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Or did I invent him? Mischief companion.

Brother. Listen to me

plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're already dead.

How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam's ever? I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.

Elisa Gonzalez, the winner of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, is at work on her first book.

[0278ji]

Kehidupan di benahi arahan redaksi.

Langit menghitam oleh residu gas air mata, matahari yang tenggelam, serta bayang-bayang teman-teman kami yang tewas dan tertangkap. Gedung-gedung pemerintahan dan korporat mulai menyalakan lampu-lampunya. Layar-layar neon iklan berkilau di sepanjang jalan. Bisnis dan kekuasaan yang terus bergulir, seolah sengaja menunjukkan bahwa mereka akan tetap demikian kendati hari ini. Kendati kami yang kini basah kuyup, kelaparan, letih dan babak-belur di tepi-tepi. Beberapa di antara kami bertengger di pucuk-pucuk pagar, memanjati atap halte bis, membentangkan kain dan papan-papan yel yang sudah buram. Tersulut oleh perlakuan diam dan sadar bahwa kami mungkin tidak akan pulang hingga malam. Esok kembali mengulangi hal yang sama dan demikian seterusnya.

Sebelum hari benar-benar gelap, seorang peserta aksi di tengah kerumunan berseru sesuatu yang tak mampu kudengar jelas, dan tiba-tiba gelombang massa terhalau mundur seperti air laut tersapu angin. Letupan-letupan gas air mata memenuhi udara. Pasukan berperisai telah kembali maju di balik gelombang itu.

Kami berlari menaiki tangga jembatan penyeberangan jalan, segera memenuhinya dari dua arah. Lampu-lampu telah mengganti cahaya matahari, tapi tiga demonstran—dua laki-laki dan satu perempuan—jatuh terjerembab ke jalan. Sepasang petugas berseragam meraih mereka dan kekerasan selanjutnya sudah dapat diduga. Pukulan tongkat karet di kepala, jambakan rambut, tendangan sepatu bot, sodokan popor senjata di perut sebelum mereka diseret ke pinggir untuk interogasi.