Why did you come here? How?, and: Dear Mothership
2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2024.a918441
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
ResumoWhy did you come here? How?, and: Dear Mothership Marcus Wicker (bio) Why did you come here? How? from Out of This World: FAQs one for the money / yes sir / two for / autonomy / the disconnected hum / of economy / leisure culture / Hennessey / pianissimo mornings & / touch / you were saying? / sorry? / let me take that again _____ The original draft of Sir Isaac Newton's First Law of Thermodynamics ends, "Vibrations are neither lost nor destroyed; but transformed, sampled or remastered, transferred from one party to the next." On a subatomic level, long after the ignition has been killed, twisted backwards, the trunk knock ceased—idling in the speaker box, dormant in a particle of synthetic wood—a ghost note echoes through time. Which is to say, while man cannot live on sound alone, Stankonians can. It's easy when your body is no body. When Minnie Riperton's soprano glides across wax, up, up, and off an invisible scale, her vocal cords vibrate, causing the surrounding air molecules to respond in kind. Which is to say, when your body is all clef and circuitry—a crisscrossed network of membrane and red ledger lines—even an echo is a pulse. Untuned static at the end of a radio dial.But surviving is not the same thing as living, so I left weightlessness for the Peach State. Streamed my sonic organs into a dark skin suit. Packed and stashed the essentials in a graveyard of Michael McDonald MiniDiscs: iridium drumsticks [for defense]; two turntables, one love, and an E.T. mpc iii. I was done with my cacophonous galaxy and its blissed-out dissonance. The stereophonic suppression of my emotional clarity.At the end of January, in the year of our Mother Two Thousand Twenty, my space basshead uncle arrived before dawn at the trash heap's edge. It was there I swapped a History of Disco archive for his Audio Actualizing Headphones. A few decibels beyond that—below a Prince-purple sky, the fussy-bearded Muzak rubble—for the first time in millennia, my metronome slowed something sweet. Like a pendulum coated in honey. I rested a beat. Slid them on, and the world went mute. Gone was the night's chatter: a ghastly rattle of AI-amplified cicadas. I shut my eyes and pictured Isaac Hayes on the cover [End Page 13] of the Shaft soundtrack. And when they opened, it was me, laid back in my youthful skin suit, but also him at the wheel of a turquoise Eldorado. Two-toned and outfitted in gold. Sharp as the crease of a deacon's best slacks. His midnight shades eclipsing my surrogate's symmetrical cheek bones in the rearview. I spun the dial softly, as if I played piano in the dark. Then the drums dropped, the woofers thumped, and I was out— [End Page 14] DEAR MOTHERSHIP Earth is reeking. And we obsidian-backed, wingedcling to the funk in a language that never fails: Peace vibes.Wonderment, and all that pimp shit. An ambrosia we inventto savor roses through the stink. Like witchgrass effacinga wheat bed with a gangster lean, bias paralyzestheir country—white flame searing through red & blue cells.Branded into whosoever drinks. America, the perforatedstraw in a single fold; stop creasing my visage with grief!If only in the beginning someone said: I wish us the sun& everything under it. Perhaps then we'd survive by friendship,happiness, justice, love. Say: Together we can do the necessary.If only from the jump pled everyone at the house party:Mothership, teach me how to be neighborly. How to gather lightin. Then release. Mother, please teach me how to be human. [End Page 15] Marcus Wicker marcus wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D. A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. He is a 2023–2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. Copyright © 2024 Marcus Wicker
Referência(s)