
Original Art by Shana Bulhan
Shana Bulhan
911 operators ask too many questions everything reds to cacophony
the yellow and green of a cushion stained fall leaves crevicing like failure
so i become an accomplice strangling impertinent upon an annulled milieu
i cultivate impairment temper to traumatize abstract the extreme
surpass the politics of visceral horror [1]
what is it like to feel so sure of oneself?
someday there will be an ultraviolet discovery of our bloodied floor 5 years
in the cracks beads, crumbs, detritus recalcitrant shoes in the living room
mostly a reiteration a removal of sharps
where i reveal my propensity to accommodate consensus [2]
i play the form forget its name i am an autonomous agent [3]
i catapult back to nineteen exuberant and earnest
i crazy my way through classrooms a commodity of fundamentals
classy at fourteen ribbons around our ears you are my one and only
glass of sweet red wine
we call this a machine a precarious profitability of lack [4]
i frenzy my way into your words fashion a curriculum of subjectivity
there is never enough time
my knees ache i live this excuse between righteous and dispensable
i come up against the democracy of my affective attachments [5]
i whip myself apart as if to finally understand
dispense of me dispense of me, again
i commodify my imaginary debilitate and elucidate strategically incapacitate [6]
become under a dialectic of surveillance
i possess value i concede demand compensation for mobility
separate me, no simultaneity i sanctify. i magnify
I COME ALIVE AT THE SITE OF DISTINCTION
so: racialize. disable. demur. demand. reinstate the humanist subject [7]
deny intercorporeal permeability [8]
i will always exceed historiographical intervention [9]
i form you both as periphery to my utterance and core of my embodiment [10]
i unlearn my incoherent attempts to finally get it right
you make me proliferate an asymmetry of choice and chance
you make me empathize with a system exposed [11]
and i love you like collapse i can’t calculate the excess of it
i just want to be a girl incapacitated for hours tap dancing to saturn’s rings
teach me, teach me this ringing gold we call this a solar system
i hospitalize it this transnational tremble
i am more complicated than hyperseparated [12]
i am critiquing the teleology of social theory [13]
so it’s i love you all over the philosophy of friendship scrawled on preteen desks
crayon slides among crayon swings it’s amazing what you can fit
into fifteen minutes
i learn to call them bleachers these steps where i snub you
buried in my books as we succumb to brochures
do you whirl through delhi now? are you the crust underneath my tongue?
everything is so orange and missionary now
the cat slinking and cruelly appraised
i line my eyes in papaya save me all at once as i scalp and scrape
manufactured flakes
i am searching for something more than blue blood
the boys lay traps for each other i materialize the medicine of capital
labour-power, not labour [14] i skip to the end and you forgive me anyway
i need to citizen my longing into expropriation
this isn’t swings up in the painted garden no assimilation motif of chopsticks
in chandigarh no more running up gilded stairs
the boy is drunk pimpling beside me in the black car
just another version of the boy who takes psychiatric notes and mimics sodomy
like flinging glass the veil before the stage
all these boys inside of me i won’t touch you if it’s all i can be
the weapon inside
i shiver by the pond i am still that bubble college girl
i anticipate illumination [15] caffeinated nights mercurial, uncontainable
no original unity [16] borne of emotion rather than affect
i am still eighteen for ramen noodles and shared violations
where we laugh in laptop domesticity
am i creaking at the joints? am i enough of flesh?
i’m calling this a love song a mimicking pompadour a stilting, a wedding
in this room full of fruit peelings i can slip my whole fist inside
your skinny white girl cave
but it’s april, and we’re leaving so i watch you fold demure colours
in translucent plastic bins i anonymously, halfheartedly disguise myself
in movement presuppose ability as i puddle apart in shared elevators
this counterpublic of aesthetics
i didn’t know any more than hauling boxes haphazard through basements
of brown paper i didn’t know any more than to fuck you and leave
call it a reminiscence but i couldn’t be myself i had to ameliorate
the viability of bodies [17] make you stronger a fillingness more sublime
somewhere queer and imperceptible [18]
i sink i sink i sink i swallow the not-yet-here [19]
i can’t be a city for you to roam
[1] Hemmings, Clare. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press, 2011. pg 197.
[2] Gudavarthy, Ajay. “Brahmanism, Liberalism and the Postcolonial Theory.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 51, no. 24, June 2015, pp. 7–8.
[3] Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. p 176.
[4] Bulhan, Shana. “The Precarious Profitability of ‘Lack’: Racialized Disability under Capitalism.” Unpublished manuscript. 2018.
[5] Hemmings 195.
[6] Erevelles 25-26.
[7] Erevelles 176.
[8] Erevelles 42.
[9] Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Duke University Press, 2006. p 16.
[10] See Sinha’s analysis of core/periphery
[11] Bulhan, Shana. “Women’s Rights in Modern Indian History.” Unpublished manuscript. 2010.
[12] Gudavarthy 17.
[13] Hemmings 7.
[14] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?” What’s Left of Theory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, edited by Judith Butler et al., Routledge, 2000, pp 1–39.
[15] Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009. p 3.
[16] Crawford, Lucas Cassidy. “Transgender without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 127–43.
[17] Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, June 1994. p 249.
[18] See Crawford’s concept of “imperceptibility”
[19] Muñoz 1.
Shana Bulhan is studying Poetry in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They are also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies. Previously, they studied Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College. They grew up mostly in India, but they have been living in Western Massachusetts for 11 years now. Their work has previously appeared in the Asian-American Literary Review, Reservoir Lit, The Felt, Datableed, and other publications. For more, visit their website at www.cruxate.com.