After Rachel Zucker’s “Poem” from Museum of Accidents Rachel Zucker wrote that Matt Roher told her not to go dark in a poem or rather when she sensed it was getting dark she should just not & Matt Roher told Chad Sweeney that he would read at Cobra Milk in Bushwick & I made a dumb little flier with his name on it & he decided not to read or rather he told Chad he would not be reading after all & so I made another dumb little flier with not his name on it & this is not a poem or a story about happiness or the things we tell each other when we need to believe the world will be okay & Jason & I are trying to reawaken old writing & make it new & it’s not because we don’t love these things anymore but maybe this is also true & I think about how I rearrange my sons toys so that that they might seem new & he might fall in love with them again & now I’m making it sound like newness is a prerequisite for loving something or maybe just the perception of newness like if I cut my hair which I haven’t but probably should & there are many love poems about hair I think Rilke wrote something maybe an elegy & I also wrote a love poem about Rilke and my hair but it was a sad poem and maybe not exactly about love but about what happens when your mentors & teachers & favorite writers try to fuck you not literally but also yes literally & that poem was dark & Matt Roher was maybe wrong to say don’t get dark & if he read at Cobra Milk would those poems have been happy poems but I don’t know what a happy poem is exactly when I think of a happy poem I think of laughing but when I think of laughing it’s often because something was so fucked up but I think when I was young I would laugh for purer reasons my son laughs when I make faces & when I show him pictures of animals & when he sees animals in person & sometimes for no reason at all he will just laugh & I love it & I love it every time & I love it because it’s not new
Erin Mizrahi is a poet, scholar, educator, curator and editor-in-chief of the multimedia literary and arts journal, Cobra Milk.