nat raum

journal (take #47)

—after Erika Gill  

dear diary, there’s that adage, the one about how nothing is guaranteed but death and taxes, and i’m starting to think that tasks have wormed their way into this guarantee, sort of in the same way that there are always dishes in the kitchen sink, laundry on the closet floor—or maybe those are subsets of the greater whole that is the task system, thrust upon us by big task to sell more tasks, more things to do, more reasons not to sit on the couch and turn on the witcher 3: wild hunt for what has to be at least the twentieth time, flick my candles-and-more bic lighter into the bowl and follow the instructions on my new orleans tourist t-shirt—inhale the good shit, exhale the bullshit—and there is bullshit aplenty, tasks like a hydra whose head thuds to the hardwood floor and in its place sprout back three more fucking tasks, each more elaborate than the ones that came before it and i won’t even bother swinging that sword again, because i know what’s coming; eventually, there will reach a critical mass, a point where there are so many tasks i don’t know which direction to turn my head, can only stare at the pile of unmailed packages in my living room and feel an unending terror, and yes, when we are all drowning these tasks will cease to matter, but they matter now and now is hell and hell is tasks and tasks cloud the landscape before me like popups on windows xp wallpaper, only a nuisance and never a reward—never, ever a reward.

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Statement of Homage

I wrote “journal (take #47)” after “When we are all drowning” by Erika Gill after hearing them perform the piece at FRUITCAKE, a queer reading series I host in Baltimore. I was so struck by the relatability of the quoted line: “when we are all drowning /these tasks will cease to matter” and how it felt so applicable to my own life at the time. I considered my own relationship with tasks and obligation, ultimately deciding to carry the reader through the piece without taking a breath. I also considered the breadth of Gill’s work, which has lately centered around late-stage capitalism and other horrors of the modern world.

Erika Gill

Erika Gill (they/them) lives, writes, and builds community on unceded Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) land in Denver, Colorado. Erika is the Editor-in-Chief of Alternative Milk Magazine, an independent literary and art magazine. They grew up longest in Victorville, CA, which is notable only in being the filming location of The Hills Have Eyes. Erika’s poetry may be found in Rigorous, MORIA, Birdy, and other spaces. Their first collection of poetry, Lone Yellow Flower, is forthcoming from Querencia Press. They can be found online at erikagill.com.

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on the high road

—after Bleah Patterson

turns out? bullshit! and how could i ever

think my friends would believe the other side

of this platonic breakup if they’ve never

heard it, and now that i say it out loud, i wonder

how i could have ever thought these people

were my friends? beside the point—

all i want to do is mourn a few late autumn

nights—radroaches i never killed in fallout. dabs

of questionable origin i never sucked into

my lungs. and i never called anything perfect

but if there is good in this world, then there

have to be good old days hiding behind whatever

my old roommate is hiding behind; the truth

must live somewhere in the center.

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Statement of Homage

I wrote “on the high road” after “The friends I had at nineteen are all blocked on Facebook now but” by Bleah Patterson, from her chapbook The Influencers Are Gaslighting Us. The beauty of friendship (and the similarly-weighted tragedy of its dissolution) as a young adult is something I am intimately familiar with, and this poem captured it so beautifully. I thought about the friends I had at nineteen and why I am no longer in touch with any of them.

Bleah Patterson 

Bleah Patterson (she/her) is a southern, queer writer born and raised in Texas. Much of her work explores comp het, deconstruction, American girlhood, and women’s confessional poetry as it responds to inequitable emotional labor. Her various genres of work are featured or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Write or Die, Phoebe, The Texas Review, Milk Press, Beaver Magazine, Across the Margins, Electric Literature, Queerlings, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She can be found online at bleahbpatterson.weebly.com.

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