olivia newton john – let’s get physical - hanif abdurraqib

[luckyzukky]

& o Olivia, I can tell by the way your neck / is pulled into a tight arch / & the soft parting of your lips / on
the cover of a record / that has known more than its fair share of hands / our sweat did not arrive on the
back / of the same animal / & yet / I take everything about this as a challenge / & anything that can carry
me gasping / into the breeze of a hot saturday / is my master / & so when a shirt clings to my chest / I
give thanks / & so when I am offered water from a stranger / I give thanks / & so when the wet and hairy
forearm of another man drags itself across my cheek in the middle of our fifth straight full court game / I
give thanks / & when I wipe away the small river it has left / & I look into my palms & see the small beads
dancing like children racing towards the end of summer / I give thanks / & physical, too, is the moment
when the night slips past too many drinks / & two pals first playfully push fists into each other’s ribs / &
then remember whatever loneliness has them in its teeth / & then the fists pull back & swing forward /
with more violence / until there is nothing left but weeping in the grass-stained sweaters / passed down
two generations / & I know this is truly not what you mean, Olivia, when you summon the boys
horizontal / but let us not stand on ceremony / we will all be laid horizontally when the world is done
having its way with us / & due to this, I remain thankful / for what a burden it must be / being asked to
exist for an entire life of rising & again falling for another’s pleasure / & o, Olivia, I wish to know the devil
but not hell itself / I wish to know the secrets that the worst of our dead know / but I do not wish to walk
among them / I am sorry to speak of half measures again / but I have run out of ways to ask for directions
to any party with a blood hot neon light beating / down from the wooden beams of someone’s basement /
in a part of town where no one calls the cops / & the cops wouldn’t come even if they did / & this is
physical: the space and who gets to plant their flag into it / among the twerking masses / & o, Olivia, I am
sorry to say that we do not listen to you at parties in the hood / but for when the stereo from a 1986
pontiac driving past pulls you moaning / let me hear your body talk / into an open window / & your voice
bends more & more with each passing block / surely if my body could speak it would ask / who will not have
a meal to call their own so that I can remain full / or it would ask / what hours are we stealing from the wicked in order to
keep living like this / & what is sleep these days but a chapel to run into & seek forgiveness after the ravishes
of intimacy / & o, Olivia, like you, I have tried to keep my hands on the table / & like you, I just want
everyone to get the hint without me speaking of what I actually want / & all of this silence this makes us no
better than the animals who paw at the doors of their small gods / & pray for the food that may fall from
their trays / & o, Olivia, I have long given up on leather / like I have long given up on headbands / I have
long given up on trying to stop the sweat from spilling reckless into my own eyes / & I embrace the brief
and aching darkness / & the darkness itself is physical / how smoothly it can lean into us / & convince the
tongue out of hiding / & yet, I still run every morning / not into or out of anything / only until I cannot
feel my legs / or until the wind decides to carry me home / or until my shirt is baptism-slick / or until the
body finds either a silence /or a language that exists / for no one but itself.

(hanif abdurraqib)
(source)