A couple more references for this poem.
There's a reference to a resin, a particular technique, Barniz
de Pasto, which was practiced, is
and was practiced by Indigenous communities
in the savannas of Colombia.
When Spanish colonists arrived to colonize that region,
they were very taken by this technique
because it approximated the lacquered boxes of Asia
that they so coveted.
And so they conscripted local folks to make the resin.
You have to stretch it from your mouth and fingers
to get it thin enough.
Forgive me for this, but it's relevant.
NoFap is a notion of controlling your desire
to masturbate, specifically when it's
marshaled by right-wing groups like the Proud Boys.
The ideology behind it is if you could only control your desire
to masturbate, you could then control your women,
and then you could control your household,
and then you could control your neighborhood,
and then you could control your town,
and then you could control your state,
and then you could control your nation.
And this is for my friend, the Palestinian-American poet,
Fady Joudah.
Scale Up
Dignified or bruised by looking at an inflatable swan in my pool
As large as our times, there's all ancestors to scale up
Desert heat waves folding air forward and back
into a fixed point
A hold on our mothers' adulthood like it's the thing
From which most of time will run away
With the purest gold rings I inherit
My grandmother's bracelet stamped
with the scales of snakes
We had so much ideas, tasks, that don't really
ask for names to burn in some America's idea of presentness
So now what inheritance should make me feel terribly enjoined
to the bros of first settlement
When every day still in a day-- in their dedicated habit for one
another men love me
Asking about my American sentence shapes like barefoot
sweet thing, Proud Boys, NoFap, The New York Times
And don't these amount to nothing
but a people's bad examples of transiting elements
Now crush the buds in the old way
In boiling water to make the resin stretched with a friend
into thinning sheets from our mouths and fingers
Comes a lacquer where we could render any of the pretender gods
Scaled to look small and distant in the layers
of polish and depth
The men hoped our treatments would lend to local wood
As generously as the phrase cultivate your power
Brings news to each next theater of war
Resting in my nerve to write about tear gas by way of drone
And the lacquered frame of my mirror wanting to be polished
And now say enjoyable morning
To have left a nation's bed
Shining basically eagle-shaped
Tasting of a sugar that delays what sweet
Sorry, not sorry, for the dirt on my feet