STATE LINES
Tommy Pico was raised on the Viejas Indian reservation in San Diego County. His new collection, “Nature Poem,” is one long, book-length sequence. The passage reprinted here highlights Pico’s themes and casual style. Instead of following the conventions of the pastoral tradition, in which nature is revered, Pico adopts a tragicomic view. On the one hand, the land of his native people can be described with great reverence, desert nights that “chill and sparkle and swoon with metal/ lighting up the dark universe.” On the other, that same landscape carries and extends legacies of racism and genocide that Pico is determined not to forget. (“NDN,” in the fourth stanza, is contemporary shorthand for “Indian.”)
Nature Poem (excerpt)
Science predicts we’ll discover alien life by 2025 Dudes’ legs on the subway are constantly spreading Nature asks aren’t I curious abt the landscapes of exoplanets — which, I thought we all understood planets are metaphors like the Vikings, or Delaware The night sky yawns over the city, indistinct but for the spell Miss Night Sky of my childhood was darkest toward the desert, where her features chill and sparkle and swoon with metal lighting up the dark universe I wanted to stop looking up and start marching forward like a metaphor NDN teens have the highest rate of suicide of any population group in America. A white man can massacre 9 black ppl in a church and be fed Burger King by the cops afterward. A presidential candidate gains a platform by saying Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists It’s hard for me to imagine curiosity as anything more than a pretext for colonialism so nah, Nature I don’t want to know the colonial legacy of the future. Permission line: Used with permission of Tin House Books. © 2017 Tommy Pico.
Tommy Pico is the author of two books, “Nature Poem” and “IRL.” Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation in Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn. David Roderick is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley. He is author of “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.”