Santa Marta

by M.C. Jia

You know what, I’m tired of fighting

Modernity is mostly good 

There

Are you happy

It’s like, who would choose to live this way

If they could be a hunter-gatherer

But like

No one just “gets” to be a hunter-gatherer

Anymore 

That way of life

Requires some serious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . square footage

So now we have VR porn

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful 

(Who among us has not 

Contemplated selling feet pics) 

But sometimes living under empire

Is an exercise in patient half-smiling

As ugly men insist

Yet again

That you were born feeling like this

Like 1987 bestseller “The Chalice and the Blade”

Being lampooned by the press as “illegitimate”

Or “flat-out bonkers” 

For insisting 

Something like feminism 

Might have predated war

Listen

At this point 

Is it even worth doing

If it’s not gonna be lampooned

Can we even afford

To be unlampoonable

In these fucking conditions 

I sit

In this distant country

Sweating through these sailor’s breeches

A sweating glass of corozo

The colour of my niece’s crayon heart

As a band of playa-dwellers

Traipses up the beach

To play us honeymoon songs

O honey

We tried it your way

We tried to save things

Through the language of economics

I’m just saying

What if, for once

We rode language itself

Like a cowgirl

Rides the beast to its glorious knees

And emerges sweatslick and panting

In the coliseo of the now

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ABOUT THE CREATOR

Photo Credit: the author

M. C. Jia is a Chinese-Canadian artist, performer and ethnographer based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Adroit Journal, Arc Poetry, Vinyl, Room, and The Panacea Review. She was a finalist for the CV2 Foster Poetry Prize and the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize and the winner of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire College Poetry Contest. By day, she runs IRID.space, a design school focused on uncommon approaches to civic problems.

Website: cargocollective.com/mixue

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