Consent Sonnets

I’ve been given a body— What do I do with it?
-Osip Mandelstam

For a while I stayed at a former convent school in France. 
My room was directly above the kitchen. It was summer 
and nobody ever cleaned up their mess, 
so I’d lie in my bed as the flies flew in and 
out of my window, landing, often, directly on my lips. 
As the summer flew by they got better at dodging, and 
I got less willing to leave my room and subject myself
to the beautiful people below. I began to pretend
we were being intimate, that I was letting the flies 
kiss me and crawl all over me. Which was a way of making myself 
more okay with the thing I couldn’t prevent, 
imagining it as an act of love. I do love people, 
but I’m never sure whether what I want most
is to be free or okay with what’s already happening.

That summer the blue sky was stuck, like a hotline on hold. 
It never rained. The boy I planned to move in with that fall
hadn’t figured out he was a boy yet. And the strain of bearing 
his endless tears had finally snapped all desire I had
to fuck him. On a blue damask couch one night, after some kind 
of failed experiment, Norbert told me how the same had happened 
to him, how fickle he had found his own warmth to be. 
Listening, I shuddered. “Does it ever come back?” 
Later, when the boy fucked me, he did it like he was destroying himself. 
Sometimes after, in our little room above a nightclub, I'd read
Samuel Delany, or once I watched a long lecture on schizophrenia. 
The nightclub cast a blue glow on the ceiling. He hit me, sometimes. 
He came harder with me than with anyone else. I feel very little
about it now. There is no passion left from that time in me.

A year or so on and the boy and I had nearly run our course. I’d decided to go
home to the States, so we found him a place on the outskirts of St. Petersburg 
for 8,000 rubles, with Evroremont, in an old Brezhnev-era block—a factory district. 
Outside the building there were apple trees growing in the metal-poisoned soil. 
Inside the room was a horrible couch, a monster filled with mites and old stains 
that must have been built inside the room, since there was no way to remove it. 
We found an ad for couch destruction in the online local listings and called. 
That afternoon a man named Dima arrived on a children’s bike, his body massive 
and his voice like a flute, and using only a steak knife from our kitchen he dismantled 
the couch, dumped the fragments out the window, and left. The boy began to panic over 
what the neighbors would say when they found the rubble in the bushes. As the dark sank 
its teeth into us, I had to admit he was right. We called the company back 
over and over, but got only drunk men. The night wind smelled like apples, 
like ginger, like the dust of the road. I will never be able to go back to that place.  

A year or so ago I saw the woman who most
recently hurt me in the way this poem is about. 
It was a warm October night. I’d tell you the story
but it’s taken a while to tell my thoughts from hers, 
as though desire had died and fear was its ghost.
So I’d rather not put her words in my poem. 
After she fell out of my life, I froze for a while, lost 
my housing a couple of times, lost my city, some friends. 
It’s happened to most of the girls I know here. 
It’s true that consent is a weak and temporary substitute 
for transformative justice and the universal provision 
of resources, which is its prerequisite. My friend Plat
said they think empire might end if the body could say yes or no 
for itself, that words are the issue. I said it can, but not yet.

December 2023. I'm walking through New York before dawn past a line 
of glassy-eyed shops. By St. Catherine’s, they're selling Christmas trees. 
My chest is broadcasting only dead air. The trees smell sharp, 
resin and rope. I can't do what is asked of me here. I want
to repeat it, again and again: I can't, I can't, although what I mean is
that I don't want to. Now where did that desire come from? 
A man is crouched by a fruit stand on a milk crate warming
his hands with a space heater. We've been working on the accounting
but somehow the accounts never add up. My face is so beautiful, 
these soft Irish curls, strong jaw, tart mouth. Last night I screamed
at my love to stop ignoring me, followed them from room
to cold room of the house. As though I couldn't just go
out into the night. The frost in their voice when they finally spoke. 
My face like a mask, twisted beyond recognition.

When I was staying at the artist’s commune, I asked
a dyke named Louise what it was like to be beautiful. She said
it was something shared with consent, that she 
allowed some people to see her like that. I asked her
whether she meant those moments when the world bends in, goes quiet
to listen, as though God had shed his grace on you and the other. She shook 
her head, held up her empty beer bottle, asked me to watch  
as she described the icon of a bear embossed on its side, the ring
of small, toothlike outcroppings around its base, how the thick brown glass
curved gently up from the stubby body to the neck, and bent
the light through it. I looked hard. She was right. It was beautiful. I think 
she meant that beauty comes out of attention, not the other way around. 
As though we could make anything beautiful if we chose. 
As though we could choose what language we’re invoked in.

********************************

The horizon is caught in a web of bright scars. 
We can talk
about who goes and who stays, 
once there’s a we we can live with. 
A we that's still living. That might not be us. So then it’s a matter of which 
words whir from our hands like escaping doves. 
I’m not saying it’s not hard 
to look in the face of someone who hates you. 
Your trust must 
be so deep and overflowing, 
the trust a dry leaf has for the wind. 
Nothing is promised 
behind this veil. 
All that matters is the symmetry breaking.

We are somewhere in Midtown and the cops are hovering
around us like flies, like bad parents on a good day, it is cold, 
it is Christmas Day, it is a protest, no one is feeling especially hopeful,
later we will be written up in the New York Post and the best bit
will be when they say the Nativity with murdered child we are carrying
is “blood-red” when it is exactly the color of the Macy’s logo, 
we hear the NYPD mobilization that day was a “three out of four” 
and there were six arrests, but I don’t know anyone 
who got arrested, we bolted when the cops got handsy, it was not 
the day for it, for us, tell me, do you remember the first time
you realized they could just put their hands on your body 
whenever they wanted, they could just touch you and hold you
down whenever they wanted, maybe it wasn’t the cops 
for you—

My namesake Robert K died of AIDS three years 
before I was born. He was a good-looking man with a long face,
an old friend of my mother’s from an old dance company. 
Growing up, I didn’t know where she got my name. She gave me 
this story only after I transitioned. In life, we consent to very little, 
and it is an extraordinary thought that in sex the bulk of our labor 
should be spent in getting, withholding, giving, and experimenting 
with consent, rather than making peace with the unavoidable; it is 
almost utopian, like a child’s stuffed toy, a secret you keep 
soft and clean, and rub for protection. As I write this 
our government has paid for the murder of 30,000 in Gaza.* 
What dream of consent can hear a trapped people
scream “no” as they’re killed by a murderous state 
and not act to stop it? Don’t we know its name?

more than a thousand people flowing as a mass into Penn Station,
some hungry, few bored, most angry or electrified, experienced maybe or not, 
reckless, dissociated, some with children at home: write the NLG number
in sharpie on your arm, if you don’t want to get arrested 
make that choice in advance: the point here is to stop the trains leaving
and to pray together in the cathedral-like space: the sound is 
overwhelming, the Presence is there, though uncertain on whose side:
from time to time the images that have come back from the bombings
rear up, displacing the image of bodies in prayer, and the world goes dull,
I don’t want to describe them: then the protestors rush out onto 8th Ave away
from the images on the electronic billboards overhead 
of the future fast becoming the past: images twisting
in the cold wind, like posters torn away from their walls, 
fireflies hunting for mates too late in the year, if I forget you, Jerusalem—

I like to think I'm smarter than God, or else 
her intelligence is so different and mycorrhizal
we're incommensurable. I like incommensurable things. 
But there's no getting around it: she's all around me, 
and last night before bed I froze, afraid her cold eyes were on me, 
calculating, waiting to make me an offer. I don't like when others
think they can get round me. When the paranoia returns, 
the hope falls away, and the urge comes back
to break my right hand. If you really loved me, 
Lord, wouldn't you be my equal? Couldn't we stand naked together 
in the dark with my hardness spent on your bitter thigh? 
I’ve been so attached to all this. What 
would I have to give up, Lord, to know 
that you and I are in this together? 

Here’s the thing. I don’t think “you” can hurt someone else
for that long without knowing exactly what you’re doing. 
I’m not talking about admitting it to yourself. That’s different. 
That’s about language. That’s what you work up 
late nite in the kitchen pacing back and forth practicing 
what you once hoped you were. Look. Do you remember
the orange fires over Rafah. Or the cold blue sky. So few clouds. 
I wonder what that color looks like when there's no bread. 
I think I can imagine; maybe someday we'll all know together. 
Now there's knowing and there’s being loyal to what your body knows. 
It breaks you open, being loyal to it. It breaks you across 
two images separated by a horizon. Maybe we can’t know exactly 
what people know when they do terrible things. But once we know 
what they’re doing, the only thing left for us is to stop them.

*The number was 30,000 at the time of the writing of this poem. The current official figure is over 40,000, but this figure has not changed for months, suggesting the true figure is substantially higher. An article in The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, speculated that the direct and indirect deaths from the war may in the end be over 186,000, though it is possible that not all of those deaths have happened yet.