Reading Rimbaud While on a Call from the Health Insurance Company

Yes, I can hold, though I’d rather you hold me.

after Rimbauds Morning of Drunkenness”, translated by John Ashbery

Yes, I can hold, though I’d rather you hold me. Here on my bed, like the guardian angels of lice, I succour & languish in inhospitable femboyish flamboyance: cheap skirts, poisons I know not to trust, yet drink. Half the joys I guzzle lay across twisted sheets, designed & condoned to kill me before the hangover, thank the rivers of heaven. Yes, hello, I’m still here. I’m uncountable lies dressed in purple upon the throne of the body. Good, I’m good, the weather, the holidays, a token on the lance of a lady. If I had a nickel for every time I avoided looking up how to bottom, I’d be able to afford my estrogen, this phone call, & a safe set of brakes for the compact. Meanwhile invisible candles whimper along the airwaves, voices of machines dowsed in the clothes of pigs (an image which is an insult to pigs). Oh, bless it, I’ve given up on meaning. The depression began like life, at a time pre-memory. Who was that boy with blond locks like blankets flapping in the basketball court wind; who was that woman measuring her cock in the mirror, found wanting? I wanted to be a king, but what do the kings think of God, God, who lies prostrate before the prostate orgasm? Yes, I can go back on hold, if only you’ll hold me in our joyous nuclear end. I just want my pills, and I’m lonely enough to enjoy the music of a stranger’s voice. Yes, the side effects: heart palpitations, loss of breath, more depression, insomnia. I didn’t have the mind to tell the doctor that the last time I truly dreamed, it was of the dead: gentle ghosts who took my offerings of makeup & floated them down the currents of time, saying let go, let go, do what you will, murder the money’d, be merry.

About the author

Willow James Claire (James O’Leary) is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for both the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in such journals as Frontier, Protean, The Indianapolis Review, Foglifter, and more. Willow holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently serves as a poetry reader for Little Patuxent Review and ANMLY.