ADVANCE PRAISE FOR PIG

  “To read this collection of poems from Sam Sax is to locate the self inside the animal, the lyric i inside the word pig. Through otherwise occidental history and personal experience, Sax seductively tracks and uses porcine manifestations as correlatives for rendering desire, the desire to be known, and the systems of power that threaten such knowledge. These poems are animated, and reanimated, by a queer and queenly sonic intelligence that wrestles with itself and, ultimately, reaches for the hope required to persist. ‘all i. want is. to live,’ the speaker says. ‘& live.’ ”

  —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

  “In Pig, Sam Sax charts a complicated and haunting portrayal of body, home, desire, nation, and beast. Sax is able to weave humor throughout their invention, creating new lyrical and visual terrain for language, for connection, for feeling, and for possibility. This book invites you in and then winds through the labyrinths of the mind, body, and history. Sax’s words open and open, creating a space of examination of the pig in so many forms. As soon as I started reading the book I could not stop; these are poems that I could build a home in.”

  —Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters

  “There are few things I love more in writing than the absolute pleasure(s) of multiple considerations—a writer who holds an object in their hand and turns it over, tenderly, affording an audience a look at their obsession from several angles. Sam Sax takes this to heights that only they are capable of in Pig, dissecting shape, sound, multiple etymologies, histories. These are poems as rich in playfulness as they are in heartbreak. But they shine in their relentless curiosity. ‘grief is an animal’ is beautiful all on its own, but it is the questioning that follows—what kind of animal? let’s cut to the chase, after all.”

  —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America

  “In this deeply lyrical and experimental tour de force, Sax smashes and inspects every interchangeable lens of the pig, literal and figurative, to unflinchingly examine sexuality, grief, xenotransplantation, and the nature of language itself. Biblical and humorous, provocative and tragic, these poems evoke an absolute and necessary understanding of the very boundaries of our humanity.”

  —Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country

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  The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

  —George Orwell, Animal Farm

  STRAW

  CUTS

  head, loin, rump, shoulder, back fat, belly, neck,

  ribs, picnic, jowl, shank end, clear plate, side,

  spareribs, bacon, ham, hock, foot,

  hind feet.

  A BRIEF & PARTIAL HISTORY

  the first pig wasn’t a pig at all. was wild, sus scrofa.

  practiced cannibalism, coprophagia. was named

  darling in the garden & evolved from an ear of corn.

  eve said pig & the world was. the first drawing

  of any animal was made by a man using blood

  & flowers to throw up the pig on a cave wall.

  the first meal made from a pig was breakfast.

  the last meal, supper. the first meal made for a pig

  was all god’s green earth, the acorn orchards

  planted in jagged rows, the detritus of lesser species.

  the word pig comes from the middle english picbred

  meaning acorn, but pig existed before we had tongues

  to name it. today we might call them soy & hormone

  factories. the first book written about pigs was published

  in 3468 BCE, the last will be this, until it isn’t.

  you who have but one mouth with which to take

  apart meat, to name yourself & the inherited species,

  do your work with care, as i have tried & failed here.

  in the beginning pig offered its body so the world

  might be built & when this world ends,

  pig will inherit.

  PIG BTTM LOOKING FOR NOW

  i take pills & pass out in front of cameras.

  an overdose on a live streaming jerk-off site

  would be an embarrassing way to go

  no matter who you are. they’re angry i’m gone.

  don’t like to see a body emptied of its spirit.

  draws attention to their own, body i mean.

  would rather watch pleasure stampede through

  a stranger like water through a hotel faucet.

  we all leak behind screens. i close my eyes only to open

  them on the same country. open them on a man

  braying like a dial tone, a group of girls laughing

  in tacoma, messages asking: you okay? you dying?

  you dead? don’t move. don’t make a sound—

  i close the computer. i go rinse my mouth.

  LISP

  there are more s’s in possession than i remembered / my name hinges on the s / is serpentine / has sibilance / is simple / six-lettered / a symbol / different from its sign / sound shapes how we think about objects / the mouth shapes how sound spills out / how the speaker’s seen / a sigmatism is the homosexual mystique / my parents sought treatments / i was sent to a speech / pathologist / sixth grade / a student / she gave exercises / i was schooled / practiced silence / syllabics / syntax / my voice sap in the high branches / my voice a spoonful of sugared semen / i licked silk when i spoke / i spilt milk when i sang / when i sang sick men tore wings from city birds / so i straightened my sound / into a masculine i / the s is derived from the semitic letter shin / meaning my swishiness is hebraic / is inherited / it’s semantic / no matter what was sacrificed / the tongued isaac / a son against the stone of my soft palate / still i slipped / my hand inside my neighbor’s / waistband & pulled back pincers / sisyphus with the sissiest lips / split-tongued suidae / sassy & passing for the poisoned sea / now when i say please / may i suck your cock / i sound straight / as the still second hand / on a dead watch.

  RAINBOW QUEEN ENCYCLOPEDIA

  my ex wanted a pet pig, so we imagined it.

  even gave the thing a name, rubbed its invisible head

  before bed—

  years later, on a rooftop, my ex confesses

  she cheated on me: the city stretching out before us

  filled with brightly locked doors.

  the harm’s far enough away i don’t notice it.

  a footnote swallowed ages ago. the pig would have been

  beautiful—then grown too large for our small home.

  would have needed more than us kids could offer

  and then what needle would have ended us all

  sobbing in the animal doctor’s office;

  blaming each other for the holes in the wall.

  i’m glad we split when we did like a book

  of hypothetical names. glad to have only suffered

  in the imaginable ways. O Rainbow Queen

  Encyclopedia, in some other world you are still

  a pig-child dancing through immaterial fields

  beheading tulips, snout rooting out heaven.

  better to have only existed for a time in the imagination—

  to never have to die.

  BABE THE PIG DOES THE SHEEP-NOISE WHEN MOURNING ITS SHEEP MOTHER

  grief is an animal. we all know that. but which animal

  exactly? what kingdom, what family, is it ever a fish?

  does its voice change as it leaves the body or is there

  a bestiary somewhere in the chest?

  great bone ark that crates and creates each heaving

  lamentation. remakes the grieved thing as noise.

  at the televised funeral the ingenue performs the gone

  singer’s living song and for a moment is overtaken

  slow howl opening the painted cage of her mouth.

  when S died i made sounds i haven’t made since.

  it came into me as wind. it rode me as wind

  PORTRAIT OF DRAG QUEEN WITH A PIG NOSE

  Oakland, 2019

  \

  behind the gas station the queen begins facing away from the crowd. low-cut back, floor-length gown. pulses a knee to the music, arm on hip, believable human silhouette. i should know this song. the rest of the audience sings along, lit by a rented spot. bride to tires and oil. centuries pass as she turns slow as a planet with all us dying on it. the reveal, below the veil, her silicone snout, scarred and profound. hybrid thing. elegant-bipedal-terrifying. think monster but make it fashion. think what monsters go into making fashion. we gasp at the temporary godhead standing before us, the promise of all our science inside one passable prosthetic. in a laboratory in california scientists inject human stem cells into a pig fetus and for four weeks it lives. miss vice, you are the perfected form of all our darkest literatures smiling. you are the language we’ve been looking for when we say we need a new language. darkness dragged, bathed in light. the song ends. she sniffs. collects her tips.

  SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

  my grandfather castrated pigs as a child



  he tells me this casual as bread

  when i bring up the book i’m writing

  some thirty-odd years of talking

  and this is the first that information raises its head

  and shakes the mud from it

  his father, i learn, was a farmer outside

  baltimore. summers he’d be tasked with slicing

  into piglets how one de-pits an avocado—

  excising the sweet meats, seizing

  their means of reproduction

  how many pigs did you castrate, grandpa?

  just a handful

  and i picture hands the size of pastures

  filled with castrato pigs singing opera oddly

  wagner probably

  my grandfather wears shirts with buttons,

  is freudian by training, obsessed with the germans

  their brutalist art

  i can hardly imagine him scolding a dog—

  how is it we are always where we’ve been

  even when unaware of it?

  one moment you’re drinking a cheap beer

  in a velour jumpsuit and the next

  you’re descendant of jewish pig farmers

  what would i learn if i were to write

  this book on an entirely different subject:

  antique clock repair, the sex lives

  of astronomers, joy

  A PIG PULLS US OUT OF PARADISE

  the trip from l.a. was mostly N paraphrasing dante.

  something about virgil being a punk-ass bitch.

  that antique hell compressed enough to become comical.

  we laughed even though we hadn’t read it.

  we smoked a thin and perfectly made blunt.

  central valley somewhere north of bakersfield.

  tomato fields in every direction, rows of red fruits.

  since it’s daylight the siren washes us first in noise.

  then the speaker commands us to the shoulder.

  paradise falling quick as ash. the officer wants.

  to know if we knew how fast we were going.

  where we’re going so fast. N curses under her breath.

  fucking pig, loud enough his mustache twitches.

  what did you say, son? he asks me just like that, son—

  the cement, bathed in daylight, refuses the cruiser’s blues.

  i smile so big he allows us to leave with a warning.

  we force laughter again over all we haven’t read.

  abridged. inferno. purgatorio. paradiso. i can’t stop.

  trembling. can’t not feel. each imperfection in the road.

  magnified inside my expensive and tender teeth.

  A VERY SMALL ANIMAL

  @ The Lafayette Inn

  last night i took pictures of myself

  in a borrowed leopard-print robe

  in my head i was beautiful, the imitation

  cat skin open as a novel at the middle

  proust or some other lonely queer

  whose obsessions make clean taxidermy

  of the temporary body. disgusting to look

  upon oneself in any capacity but especially

  here—face rearranged in the split approximation

  of pleasure. glamorous for a moment

  then gone. it’s not the lens but the living

  who fathom eternity. my face so full

  of wonder it’s sick. how many men have

  passed through this room, these lips?

  INTERPELLATION

  give me a name & i’ll answer

  whenever a mother calls it out across the park

  wanting only her child & not some tired queen

  sitting alone on a bench with a bottle

  in a brown paper bag. but still i stand

  when hailed & say excuse me, ma’am, did you call?

  & if not, what shall i do now i’m here?

  names i’ve taken inside me like mouths

  full of stale bread. sip of water names

  on airplanes over water. biblical names like a bridle.

  slurs like a bride.

  names i’ve bled out into clean bathrooms.

  names i’ve assumed & ones others assumed

  were mine. he calls me baby & i am

  preverbal & unvaccinated. boy,

  & i was. daddy & i split in half

  like a common fish. pig & i slit my own throat.

  in the throes a name can be a chicken bone

  or burning piano in the throat

  calling down something larger

  into the bed or car or bathroom or

  say my name & they all join us here,

  all the sams before me & all the sams

  to come. say bitch

  & my mouth floods with painted dogs.

  every christ, christian, jonathan.

  every lover, in one body. who i mean

  when i say you. you made of letters.

  you sobbing behind the wheel

  of your sobbing car. you showing up

  unannounced at my door.

  when i say you up at four in the morning.

  when i say of youth i was never young.

  if ever i texted too late begging

  for something ugly, forgive me.

  i meant only to address the eternal

  beloved, who i thought was, for a moment,

  haunting your phone. i who have been

  addressed & became. have lain

  with men who never bothered

  with names & still, when it comes

  time for it they always find

  something to say.

  EASY FAST QUEERS

  Yom Kippur

  —to deny oneself hunger is to deny oneself—

  —hunger is high glut & fructose syrup—

  —cult of luxury & fried drive-through windows—

  —life might indeed have ridden here on the back of a screaming meteorite—

  —but still here we persist in this annual trip around our sun—

  —who throws its goodness upon us so we might grow grains to fashion into pancakes—

  —O pancakes! could there be a more perfect representation of the circle—

  —how we are returned to ourselves to feast, drenched in the sweet blood-sap of trees—

  —once a year my people fast—

  —ask ourselves not to eat in the grease theaters of slaughtered meat farms—

  —to not cut the blushing necks of fruit stems—

  —for one day to let nothing pass between our lips that isn’t begging forgiveness—

  —atonement is a word with the letter o buried inside, which is quite factually one perfect pancake—

  —i make my annual catalog of misdeeds & sins, deny water & my mother, turn my suffering inward—

  —apologize to everything, living & dead—

  —in my youth i bttmed for gods & carnival goldfish alike—

  —i knelt before false prophets & gargled bacon grease—

  —i ate when i wasn’t hungry—

  —i have a hole in me—

  —the hole swallows everything—

  —i will be forgiven—

  —nothing—

  QUARANTINE À DEUX

  a new app tells us whether it’s safe to breathe

  i haven’t been outside in weeks

  afternoons, sunbathe on the living room floor

  beneath the barred windows

  it’s grown sepia out there

  a filter descended over the true face of the world

  the little man in my phone’s purple today—wears a gas mask

  recommends not riding a bicycle

  i wipe ashes from my packages

  my mail carrier says it’s the end of the fucking world

  if anyone, he should know: neither snow nor rain nor heat

  nor gloom of night

  almost two and half millennia ago we split brussels,

  broccoli, kale, collards, kohlrabi, all from the same wild cabbage

  such imaginations humans have

  it’s a miracle life existed here at all

  long as it has

  FOR MY NIBLINGS IN ANTICIPATION OF THEIR BIRTH

  for Sol & Ruby

 

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