New Poetry from Eros Livieratos

Read More: A brief Q&A with Eros Livieratos

A Portrait of my Father

On the phone, my father dislocates
his mind from space while speaking
in fragments. He does not remember
picking up my child-body when the towers
fell. He does not remember the smoke billowing
over the plot of land which arbitrarily dictates a border
separating us from the hungry black. I played Doom 64
on an old tube tv, practically bigger than me. Parsing through
dark corridors: I visualize his dying mind a lot like a series of choke
points. Like a loading dock or intestinal stream; a point of pressure
if stopped, disrupting the primary system.
He sits in a town where everyone who once knew him is dead
or dying on a cracking sofa, an American portrait photographed
by a gentrifying photography student, consuming IPAs in the brewery
on my block. He does not exist, but I picture shaking him from his ankles
for his Apple card™ and keys the way the big boys would on that corner
when my father’s memory was still intact.
Hofstadter wrote of strange loops
in nature, augmented patterns where the mind
functions naturally, and obsessively, like an Escher
portrait or numerology. Deleuze & Guattari wrote
of knowledge like rhizomatic roots sprawling—some
system which could be deterritorialized. My father’s
mind no longer functions in looped patterns or sprawling
roots, it’s a series of dead-ends. I remember pawing at his
sides, somewhere in New Jersey, building synapses,
concepts of small hands and love—dimming.

The Dying Visions of an American Gangster

My mother calls me to speak
about my father’s declining
mental health. He sees a three
year old boy sitting next to him
with dark skin and curly hair,
a small Eros, rotting with him.
He has to meet someone in New-
ark. He has to let them know where
to park. Where to drop the cash.
I don’t know what any of this means. […]

New York, Again:

Jakki is scarring angels
into my knee, the lines
of her face now: strong, carved
in flesh like marble. Then: kids
we’d drink—puke on stranger’s
floors. Spend days in corner book-
stores and lofty museums where tourists
were on display. Ennui in the city. Still:
life with art in our hands.
Now: older, we talk about rent
and bills and still bumming it. She’s smiling
while tracing Raphael and I’m bleeding through time
as if the motions are cherub moments. Her hands radical,
precise. Tools making beauty of flesh
I once carved in quiet. Now: I choose to relive
the moments in New York where when young, […]