haven't shared this one yet (maybe i will / just not now? sorry) - but you can read it here if you're subscribed to the cincinnati review - (& if not ...) - all you need to know is i namedrop a bunch of bands & songs / ⇌ music as conduit of what is felt & unvoiced & felt-unvoiced between the uncommunicative / roadtrip smallspace toxic yuri ^-^

contextualizing 1st lines: "Alison's Halo on the aux, or would you rather some/ Black Tape for a Blue Girl? Something upbeat? I've been loving/ Caroline Polachek lately (...)"

i want to talk about our opener, alison's halo, the arizonan shoegaze band

i love the namesongs off of their album eyedazzler - “chalkboard james”; “strand of paul”; “sounds like suzie”; “jetpacks for julian” - for how coyly but so playfully & ungatedly intimate they are; there is a letting-in of the listener being orchestrated, into something unknown & perhaps unknowable, though all the same there’s ample space for delight & resonance within said unknowability - who are james/ paul/ suzie/ julian - what does the specificity of naming conjure when all these names are ultimately brought into song via the ever-immersive but -othering “you” - are we, listeners, the jameses & pauls & suzies & julians / or are we being invited to make up or remember or hope for our very own jameses & pauls & suzies & julians - most importantly, do answers to any of these questions “really” matter? to listen is to read, which is to wrestle meaning, into what is made-&-then-heard if not made-to-be-heard; in a way, this is the poem’s thesis: “the voices, they do growl again, & one sounds like suzie—”

somewhere in there our narrator associates the first 13 seconds of ezra furman's "suck the blood from my wound" with screams of their mother

when her muscles overshortened - "the voices they do growl again", etc, history gestured at

(& little side note - black tape for a blue girl is a beautiful name for a darkwave band; readily admitting that the beautiful (& conveniently ‘b’) name was my only grounds for its inclusion in the poem initially but doesn’t the resulting reading (the run-on sense of it) insist on itself still - would ‘you’ like some black tape for a blue girl, "you" this blue girl, asking 'you' / another blue girl…)