Anna Rahkonen

I was bankrupt when I downloaded an expensive app
that gave you three coordinates to travel to called
Attractors Voids and Power improbably dense clusters
of random points Blind Spots too simply random
points and after you set the intention for your delusion
in your head you went and what I wanted was to
attract the redhead I had recently left but broadly I
just wanted to whisk myself away it was 98 degrees
and I loved the staticky sun and the march to the false
divine and my hot ass car I liked that it felt like a
sauna but I never found anything except to be
unafraid of being openly insane and I realized I am
never going to move to Los Angeles no one will give
me a job so I found Barry Hannah’s house in
Tuscaloosa where he was very depressed and drunk
all the time and I stood in his yard and mourned his
language and wore a perfume called Dirt and drove
my roommate’s dog in my car with the Ronettes up
loud the same car that took me from Toronto to
Georgia in one day and it was all the way back then I
learned you really can just drive anywhere even if you
feel guilty and so I learned to camp and bought an axe
for me and my roommate to chop wood for our firepit
because our hearts were horribly broken and we
would take turns heading out into the night to slam
the axe against branches and quietly listen to each
other’s lack of strength from the couch inside the
house and I realized I really loved to watch my
roommate in her nightgown with her contacts out and
afterhours glasses on drink a beer right under her
grandparents’ portrait but it was never going to last
there were too many Playboys in the junk pit outside
the junk house down the street and we had so much to
go do and then years blinked by and I poured so much
water on my head on another long drive to keep from
passing out in Mississippi because my Honda Fit my
little stallion now lacked air conditioning and I was
doing this because I had collapsed it all to stand in
front of a different beautiful girl in Faulkner’s foyer
and fish for a quarter to be let in his bedroom where
he threw language on the walls to envelop himself
and look the words right in the eye and shake them by
the shoulders and I wanted to just melt in Oxford and
send postcards that said I am okay I am exploring it
all but very soon after I found that I couldn’t stop
going to New Orleans and dancing and dancing and
sweating with people I’d stopped loving and asking
them pathetically to put their cigarettes out on me and
sometime eventually I read Renee Gladman and had
geometric visions of language and line greeting shape
and an exacting urge to sculpt my questions so I drew
a diagram in the margins of Calamaties to try to look
beyond words for why the novelist I had met in my
new life was a bad hang and how a roller coaster is
totally narrative with elegance and euphoria and yes
on some other classic staticky sun day the oldest fear
ever locked my body at the privately-owned
waterfalls I couldn’t believe the volume and the
incessant rush of water I felt so limp it was so
unbearable the thought of how old it all was and that
there were just natty light cans lodged in the ground
probably because it was privately-owned and I knew
we had driven all that way but I couldn’t figure our
closeness I was ready to be in my car by myself and
so I went off again and so here we are my perfect
pencil I am looking at you my back of the moon my
chart my precious data my kinky lady my fifty-nine
steps my intentions are true and conventional they
always have been like dreams and my language is all
right here and there are some sad things about my life
but loving tv was never one of them so I am placing
all my bets on fragments I wear a perfume called
Earthworm now and you two have the very same face
it’s all so similar and do you really think this isn’t
ecstasy my bicycle my clothesline be my baby my
ginger chew my scent of the salty sea my drugstore
item my pretty picture my crumb under the seat

Biographical Statement

Anna Rahkonen a writer from Alabama. Her poems have appeared in Angel Food, Antiphony, Blush, and Noir Sauna. She lives in New York City.