Alina Pleskova
Take Care
I've been trying to remember where I am.
On the phone I said
this feeling is so familiar, like a long
drive & no recollection of steering.
There’s never an arrival point— only
endurance & the occasional sensation
of re-entry into what kind of world this is.
How investors now trade water futures
& for the first time, what’s human-made
outweighs what lives on this planet.
No one I know has portfolios,
but we hear of rising stocks
generating more wealth
for no one we know.
78% are at least somewhat concerned
about the growing level of inequality.
48% are very concerned,
the survey says, indicating all odds
in favor of a rev, & yet. The state where I live
legalized autonomous delivery robots,
classified as pedestrians. The country where I live—
its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I’m from—
has endless funds & capacity to terrorize those
without the right documents, arrest someone for making off
with baby formula. Some in my family say There are proper
channels to citizenship, having overridden their own
origin stories years ago. In adapting to regional customs,
one becomes a citizen of border & bootstrap mythologies.
I’m fully local-presenting now, assuring various robots
that I’m not a robot several times daily,
micro-dosing Adderall from a friend’s Rx to achieve
a smooth email voice, obediently separating recyclables
even if I’ve seen it all carried off in the same truck.
Who am I to say what’s sustainable
in the face of the daily death ticker.
The only economy I know is stem cuttings,
pickled cabbage, shared logins, the same $20
passed around more urgently now.
The luckiest among us score mental health days—
what might, in an alternate timeline,
be the ability to simply exist. Take care
is just a signoff & not in the purview of policy.
As government-funded weather modification programs
make it rain by launching rockets full of silver iodide
into the clouds, it can be calming to think about
celestial objects moving around
in ancient patterns that precede all our fuck-ups.
That meddle with our lives in ways unknown to most.
The coming Great Conjunction is a time to release
old habits. Maybe I’ll quit trying to find oblivion
in someone else, when there’s a perfectly useable one
waiting among these slow days
of everything filed as pattern or scarcity.
Squirrels gorging on pumpkin innards.
Muffled name-spelling at the pharmacy counter.
Runners stretching their hamstrings on stoops.
Friends shit-talking what dead poets said in letters
after running out of current gossip.
We deride the algorithms for not getting us,
as if searching & lurking signal anything,
save for all this muted hunger. I’m no exception,
dreaming of how different my life could be
if I had a delicate neck tattoo or hex-countering
floor cleaner. My algorithm delivers
a $200 workshop on clearing ancestral traumas
& inherited unconscious impulsions,
plus a $1,240 purse made to resemble
a croissant— but I’ve already spent
my poetry grant on back payments
& one truly decadent burger.
It’s somewhere toward the end
of the Anthropocene & still I want
to fall in love the Kar-Wai way,
though I have the heart of a slacker
& everyone seems too woke or weary
for a ruinous type of intimacy.
Leaving the productivity app kills
my productivity shrub.
After so many days of blue light, I miss
creature comforts like karaoke duets
& wobbly elbow-linked walks &
buckling into someone’s palm,
a real voice in my ear.
Big pink neon with its yellow spur
outside Boot & Saddle blinks off
for the last time as someone says
we’ll have it all back someday.
A rowdy bacchanal awaits
those of us left, & I’d ask
who’s buying if we hadn’t already
watched the doomsday clock nudge
forward again. If I had flinched then.
Alina Pleskova is a poet, editor, and Russian immigrant turned proud Philadelphian. Her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Thrush, Entropy, Peach Mag, the Poetry Project, and other places. Her chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published by Spooky Girlfriend Press in 2017. With Jackee Sadicario, she co-edits bedfellows magazine and is a 2020 Leeway Foundation Art & Change awardee. Her first full-length poetry collection, Toska, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2023. More at alinapleskova.com or @nahhhlina on Twitter.