Daniel Borzutzky
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INSERT BODIES HERE
He gets in the way of a bullet
The city floods
He gets in the way of a bulldozer
The state groans
He gets in the way of a machine gun
He hears someone say
It’s none of your business how many people we must save from themselves
The highway is blocked
Supplies can’t get through
The city floods
He hears someone say
It’s your choice, you get to decide how much pain you want to feel
A building crumbles
A bed fills with blood
A voice says
You get to decide how much the tumor will grow
A girl starves
The lake overflows
The trucks can’t get through
No rice no bread no drinking water
A voice says
You get to decide how far you will fall
A soldier appears
He is also an artist
He talks to a journalist
I feel something “complex” about the human rights abuses I have committed
The journalist assumes he means the human rights abuses
he committed in a third world shithole
But really he means
The human rights abuses he committed here in Chicago
A boat fills with refugees fleeing Illinois and Indiana
A boat fills with refugees trying to get to Canada
The water calms
The sun rises
A prison is built out of twigs and branches
It fills up with destitute immigrants
The artist-soldier shoots himself in the head, his best performance
No one watches
A police officer asks to see our papers
We only have toilet paper
You need to apologize for getting in the way of our bullets, he says
You need to stop letting us torture you
The police officer beats us a bit
You only have toilet paper and not even that can keep your asses clean
He laughs and beats us a bit
He asks for our numbers
No numbers
He asks for our names
No names
He asks if we can measure the economic impact of our bodies in Molotov cocktails
Windows shatter
Several dogs are reported as casualties
A poet appears on the scene
A vulture appears on the scene
The poet and vulture search for the form of the apocalypse
Why do you keep getting in the way of our bullets
The form mutates
Institutions dissolve
The town radiates, glows pleasantly
The mayor gets angry
The teachers lose their pensions
The land swallows some bodies
The prison is on fire
I am limited by my intuition
I am limited by my constitution
I am limited by my indiscretion
I am limited by my access to nuclear waste
The land explodes gently
The system breaks down then regenerates
A momentary sense of triumph
I see snakes on the road
A momentary sense of triumph
I see rabbits on the road
Bees return to the city
A child is struck in the head with a battery
The whole country flows out of a dead man’s mouth
Some babies are born
Refugees keep coming from Nebraska
The police want to know what color they are
The Nebraskans don’t know what color they are
The police officers guess what color they are
They look pinkish or mauve or ochre
Someone wants to interrogate their outer layers
A philanthropist has a suggestion
Maybe we can bury them in that pretty little hole?
Words keep appearing: disease, dehydration, hospitalization
A priest and a rabbi walk into Target
That’s no priest, that’s an alley
That’s no alley
That’s another child who needs to apologize for getting in the way of our bullets
The Bank of America bursts into flames
Money flows out of a dead man’s mouth
Insert bodies here
SECRET CODE #306
A drunk poet in the audience heckles me You’re not
as good as Artaud he yells You’ll never be as good as
Artaud
He apologizes after the reading and asks me if I like
Artaud
I tell him my opinions about Artaud and he suggests
we meet for coffee
The headline of the article reads “Chicago poet seized
as fugitive killer”
She kisses me and says I only like you for your exchange
value no one cares about your use value
The fugitive poet didn’t appear to have a violent side
he was an anti-war activist and everyone thought he
was funny
When I was younger I was taught that curiosity
about the secret code would inevitably lead to
catastrophe
They say you can only understand your own body
after you have understood the bodies of others
The boys have a problem their fathers they want
to solve the problem by killing them
I only use punctuation to convey confusion? or enthusiasm!
All the words make sense I understand the text
the subtext the connotations the metaphors the
references and allusions but in the end I have no
idea what any of it actually means
I ask her for her password and she whispers in my ear
Bearwolf43!
When he was a child he believed he could change a
thing by looking at it
If I don’t see it does it actually exist?
I spent two years writing a poem called “The
Destruction of the Global Economy” It’s about a
bank that has so much money it actually has no money
at all It’s about a man who buys 100 houses and
sells them for 125% profit It’s about the way in
which the bank loans money to both the man who
sells the houses and the people who buy the houses
and when the people who buy the houses can no
longer afford their loans the bank sells the houses
back to the man who buys the houses and he sells
them again to people who cannot afford the houses
( Insert analogy about the push and pull of the
broken body )
I thought it was a good poem but I’ve never shown it
to anyone and now it sounds stale and outdated
In my head I say over and over again. Bearwolf43!
but when it comes time to type in the password the
animals have escaped me Beowulf43! Baywatch43!
It’s not a bad idea to learn how to build a ventilator
I want to believe that if I look at the television long
enough I might change the outcome of the game
My father calls with an urgent message: the market
doesn’t care about your feelings!
You can begin a sentence in the middle of another
sentence in order to make a new sentence
Care about your feelings!
You can write the sentence as if the subject were
implied or you can write the sentence as a question
It doesn’t care about your feelings! Doesn’t it care about
your feelings?
I ask about the secret code and she tells me it’s an
everchanging set of unarticulated knowledge that I am
too uncouth to access
You can take classes on etiquette you can hire a
professional to manage your skin care and hygiene
you can subscribe to a service that buys clothes for
you
I own six pairs of jeans but I wear the same ones every
day
The man who builds 100 houses says Some people
call me a successful entrepreneur Others call me a
capitalist scumbag pig It all depends he says On the
words you like to use to describe your relationship to living
I can’t focus on the movie because I keep thinking of
snappy responses I could have said to the poet who
tells me I will never be as good as Artaud
I’m sick of being alive but I’m too afraid to die
(is it okay if I tell you this?)
You can look into the sky and see a thread that
connects your body to the stars and the planets
I don’t know what that means but I suspect it might
be true
What is the name of that tree?
Biographical Statement
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator in Chicago. His most recent book is "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018." His 2016 collection, "The Performance of Becoming Human" received the National Book Award. "Lake Michigan" (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s "The Loose Pearl" (2022). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's "Valdivia" received the 2017 National Translation Award and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.