pupa jubilee
“According to the book of Leviticus; on the 49th year, the Jubilee will be proclaimed, whereupon all debts are cancelled, land returned to the dispossessed, all prisoners and slaves released to freedom.”
for Matt Wheeler
I’ll meet you again, under Halley’s comet, mi amor
ardor en los tiempos del corona
with residue of eternity
to reset astrolabe
for future memories
teeth swimming in her mouth for a bite of him
we enter the map raw & unfixed
to wait for cicada rebirths
while flagellants rehearse next door
too much hunger of the blood, mi amor
awaiting Ohio & rising sublime
palimpsest under scarred veneer:
weekend amp-collector can’t really play
& $40 trucker hat doesn’t help
keep the beat – for sucker punch
more hack life than life hack
sumptuary laws for duende drought
& Marxism for kids a jest
cliff notes on the infinite
from bourgeois leather couch
it’s time for a revolution, mi amor
for those that fight, pray & work
two dark selkies slip back in
our pupa eclosion eddied
into octopi orgy in the deep
forevermore, mi amor
bitter vetch culture defeated at last
by domus effect
with metronome emergent
heartbeat digs twin tomb
cueva de las manos
in ouroboros beginning
for a mycorrhiza welcome home
to where you haven’t yet been
everywhere the past returns, mi amor
trebuchet propeled
from paradise jubilee
with violets scattered in hallowed wells
lughnasa collected in us like clouds
with gold threads of 30 year chrysalis
while kintsugi fractures pulse in neurons
& sacred yowl moves through us
we’ve got the last 30 years, mi amor
to emerge in ripening fruit
before seeded end
in our reconnaissance of pinball
waking up again to rendezvous
with comet divine
the first time
Jodorowsky’s shipwreck
“…ultimately there is no country but childhood’s.”
—Roland Barthes
In Memoriam of Craig Schultz
“Te Quiero” whispered
to awaken the dead & break
Chronology Protection protocols
of reincarnated & merged imagoes
séance shattered with past-tense
search for Scorpius’ in summer
sky as Antares spars with
lunar light-thief’s new-now
all past constellations visible
as they once were
millennia ago
“Eres mi alma gemelo.”
variable time lines
splitting off with backward glimpses
to parallax versions of self
“No se puede murar.”
at 14 drawing negative space in Ms. Zilka’s class
at 18 copping dope in a squat on Avenue C
at 22 watching Maya Deren at Kim’s Video
at 49 listening to pandemic rain on Met’s steps
Los Caprichos with alternate
visions of future past
summoned forth by a ghost
card zero
Tarot’s fallen woodwose
flower – fruit – seed
1 – 2 – 3 & back again
newt’s dark paradise ebbs
as suicide song sprouts
requiem in antiquated tongue
for former instars
the strange overtones of a sex-stunted-mooncalf
a mensche with mommy issue marries a C+ singer
that doesn’t mind making the grade
my mouthless moth make chain link escape
past tree-of-heaven & dismantles bunk bed
childhood trauma converted
to bookshelves in three easy steps
“Mi media naranja.”
time being flexible, unruly & opportunistic
the iniquity of inequity
our time-travel couplet once lost
metamorphized to luna moths
& gets hustle on at Polchinski’s pool hall
suicidal ideation with fata morgana review:
dope-sick on honeymoon in someone else’s paradise
or in Stockholm with cartographer of shallows
symptoms may include vomiting, fever & divorce
at last we arrive in our current continuum
siesta’s dream tease & light’s ingress
through shutter-slat’s camera obscura shaded ceiling
sliding street blurs bright shifting backward
in sync with the three part rhythm
of your sleeping breath para siempre
wren boys
for Padraig
O’Malley
February 7,
2021
On the Isle of Man, the hunting of the wren on St. Stephen’s Day is a pre Christian ritual, associated with an ancient fairy (or goddess) named Tehi Tegi, which translates to “beautiful gatherer”. The original inhabitants of Man were gatherers, and the tradition contains a bit of agrarian paranoia within it. The story goes, that the men of the island followed the
charming Tehi Tegi everwhere, reveling in her charm, and consequently neglecting their homes and fields. One day Tehi Tegi led her male retinue to the water’s edge and convinced them to swim with her. She drowned every last man. She was confronted by island elders but turned into a wren and escaped. Tehi Tegi was banished from returning to the island, but she returns once a year in the form of a wren, and she is ritually hunted to this day on St. Stephen’s Day.
kill the wren
before the husbands
put down their ploughs
forgetting misery for a spell
tuck the winter king
under salted wing
& bury in sod’s dark
with bad luck all over
the place & dead in the palace
of their own body’s
track -mark stigmata’s
glorious decadence
“baseball explains everything, except winter”
cigarette-timed kisses
for Schjeldahl’s t-shirt cannon
& other moments of transcendence
her shoes all worn out
binding soul to flesh and earth
to touch outward
light subordinated into apple
give a penny to soften the earth
even a half penny will do
butterfly trapped in amber
wings outstretched & pale
needle-scarred limbs
resurrected wren with ardor
this is a circle dance for skygoers
Dākinī bikini (with a little bit of wrath)
49 DOWN Sanskrit word related to flight
decorated consort of cast-off chronicles
all the children in art class are born pigs
boar year born with gatherer potential
little dioramas of a life
our straw boys conceal
collective crone coiled
at base of spine
a sort of purge
for suitors drowned
with bird offerings
of silver’s lagniappe touch
Click to Visit More from Tracey McTague
—Reading at Welcome to Boog City 15.5 Arts Festival
TRACEY MCTAGUE is a writer and visual artist born and raised in Brooklyn,
N.Y. She utilizes a language informed by ecopoetics and the oral traditions of
the seanchaí. Gathering from cross-cultural cosmogonic myths from our
collective unconscious, she harnesses the micro protests of our ancestral
mycorrhizae as weaponized forms of macro survival.
McTague received her education in fine art and film at The New School for Social Research. She worked for Michael Moore on The Awful Truth, harassing CEOs via the art department. She has also worked for the Association for Cultural Equity and in the Allen Lomax archive, helping to preserve and prepare his vast collection of music for the Library of Congress while contacting all living descendants for ancestral reparations for everything we call music. She works for the Irish peacemaker Prof. Padraig O’Malley, who specializes in the problems of divided societies such as South Africa and Northern Ireland. She also created a photo project for an 11-nation secular collective seeking to help empower European Muslim youth through self-expression and socio-political documentation.
She was an editor and the art director of Lungfull Magazine for 12 years, and hosted the Battle Hill Reading Series for five. Her art, essays, reviews, and poetry have been in The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, among others. She is author of Super Natural and Marginal Utility, both published by New Orleans’ Trembling Pillow Press.