HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

Yes, I have my obsessions. Election season,
hottest on record. Of the 17 days no hits
were recorded on my website, 16 were bad.
The rest of the year, bad in that proportion too.
McCarthy conducting his "investigations."
Our stupid little projects. I am
an evil woman, need a sunrise alarm clock
to wake up. I "became" a communist
in college, whatever that means. I guess
it means my thinking changed. I told
everyone. "Louie," I can still hear
my grandma calling to my post-Soviet
grandpa, "did you hear that?"
T-R-U-M-P says very clearly who he dreams
of murdering. M-A-R-X is completely
intelligible, traceable, trackable, surveillable,
easy to read. This is how I know
so few Americans read at all. I am
interested in the Red Scare, post-9/11
xenophobia, and how we are now.
After the break in, even we installed cameras
but the only notifications they send me
are "person seen," "person seen," "person."

BRIEF GENIUS

When we're most connected,
I feel like you and I are little monkeys
poking at each other's bodies.
Our humanity dissolves, thank god.
The writer of the David Foster Wallace biography
I'm reading primarily concerns himself
with monitoring his intelligence,
how it went up, went down, went sideways.
Obviously, with Wallace, his genius
lived just next door to his worst qualities
and seems like the least interesting thing
about him. I want to hear about his relationship
with his sister. I am a genius every day
for about three minutes, which comes to nothing
and interrupts all that is ape-like within me.
Then it ends. The world is yours again.
And I am.

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This last poem came out of a conversation with poet-friend Jen Frantz, in which she challenged us both to write poems about "temporary genius." I was reading the David Foster Wallace biography by D.T. Max, which could incite a narcissistic crisis in anyone, I think, with its focus on IQ, genius, and Wallace's performance of these. The book felt scary and un-textural—it was hard to get a sense of how Wallace really lived because of Max's obsession with his intelligence. Wallace and my annoyance at the biography couldn't be kept out of the poem—not just because he's become a stand-in for a certain kind of literary genius, but also because his life was so brief. This is also a love poem, of course—to my husband, Kent Corbin. It essentially asserts that love is possible—when my own narcissism and self-monitoring drop away.