from Fieldguide to the Southeastern Idaho Phosphate District
[Structural Setting of Bird & Phosphor]
Most fieldguides illustrate the events influencing a landscape. But how can we relay what needs said without sounding like we’ve scavenged the husk of a road-side whitetail? Do you believe, as Freud did, that we are self-destructive? Acid-lined & rooted, deeply, beneath what we consciously perceive? To frame it this way the senses are an illusion. \ We want to fuck our mothers not because they are so, but because sex is a sort of death, & how dare they create & get away with it? Or, like Skinner, do we only seek whatever gives us pleasure, a species of hedonists? \ No morals other than dopamine. Aren’t they the same? \ The times you begged me (& it was a begging) to pin your wrists to the mattress, to overrule your breath with the sound of gravel. I am not who you think I am & so I hurt you. You are not who I think you are & so you hurt me. \ Like a dog salivating at the sound of a bell, I realized that when you bruised my most tender of organs, you saw me, hairy chest & stench of dick, as I saw myself, & I was happy. \ We called this a History of Intimacy, & thought about it as we drove by the phosphate mines. Men emerged from earth, wheezing because the air was too bright. They were not used to being treated this way & drove home to their families who glowed so white that the men had to shield their eyes—sons with clean fingernails, daughters tragic enough to date boys who wanted to be miners, wives who hated hearing canaries sing because it sounded too much like their own names.
Jesse DeLong‘s debut manuscript, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, is forthcoming from Baobab Press in April 2021. Other poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press. Besides poetry, Jesse DeLong has several chapters included in the creative writing textbook, Once Upon a Time in the 21st Century, forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.
