Digital Poetics 2.14 from ‘Perverts’ by Kay Gabriel

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Jolene says her dreams all derive
from stress: as a child
she fell through the earth while shopping
for clothes or going to school
As an adult, she says, the dreams are more varied:
she’s chased around her childhood
home, her lover rejects her, she can’t
get people to leave her work after closing
time, complete a task like opening a door
or her legs won’t let her walk, and sometimes
all of these inhibitions clamp the same dream,
for which reason she prefers not to dream at all
for years I did things like witness my midriff
buzz-sawed, my organs on display, under
the daubed gloves of a triumphant doctor
Mike reaches across an expanse and snaps me out of it
like he’s Cher and I’m Nic Cage for once in our invert lives

~

As a child Katia dreamt on repeat of a doctor
and a nurse who broke into their home, tied up
their family, came for Katia and drew their blood
Later they had a three-tiered dream of black dogs:
first in a cage, then behind an open fence,
then freed, and finally Katia met their
younger self in a room, dark and empty,
that “didn’t feel like a vacuum, it didn’t feel
like space,” a suspense in which each Katia
turns on the other like inverted commas facing
each other on opposite sides of a shout

~

Diana puts me into her dream about dog sitting
in Ithaca, not really Ithaca but somewhere
dressed up as Ithaca for Halloween
like how I dream of elevated train platforms, each level accessed
by elevator, with frequent if confusing service distributed
over a switchboard, you walk on
without paying and are always at risk of arrest
it’s Berlin but not Berlin, it’s a capital touching itself
You access Diana’s Ithaca by taking a train
to a ferry to a train, there’s a water slide river on the Hudson
In “Ithaca” we were in grad school together, we took a quest-
like field trip to the dogsitting house over a bridge of mud
and moving cliffs of moss the entire dream terrain wobbles under our feet
as we first collect, then lose, a talisman
I forgot to ask what the dog was like
when the house was destroyed it whimpered in the corner
and Diana hugged the dog, so I’m guessing that, of whatever
size or shagginess, it was pleasant to hug
we throw a grad school party for completing the quest
that’s where we lost the talisman
Diana grabs a cardboard box instead and fills it with things
we wanted to steal: brown paper lunch bags, embroidered
with flowers. I helped with the quest and the stealing, and I
pretended we hadn’t lost the talisman but instead hid it for the
next year’s class, and in another dream of Diana’s we taught
a class together, where Diana was mad at me: she kept “trying
to sneak away to be bad,” but I would pause class until she came back,
in Diana’s dreams I’m an icon of patience, not a party monster
not the kind of grad student who checked Grindr instead of studying for quals
and nearly flunked out into a marriage fated to crack
for you Diana I kept my infuriating cool
the dog was saved, we taught our class
in another dream I’ll reject your cross-borough marriage proposal
instead of making and betraying appetitive promises
to want mainly one thing in a dependable way

~

Whereas Warren Beatty unpredictably
flaccid in Bonnie and Clyde
“I’m not much of a lover boy” and Faye
Dunaway the more luminous
the more life roughs her up
Jo dreams of an unavailable crush interrupting
them with fond taunting wishes:
they’re searching for tea up and down
the aisles, they find coffee and chocolate, pop
tarts, Clif bars, but no tea
run into their district manager
he gives them a hug and makes fun of their mullet
talks to them about the new bosses
suddenly Jo’s starring in a procedural
who would I play in a procedural Probably a bluish
corpse with smoker’s lines and clues under her chipped nails
Jo I love your mullet, it’s very dirtbag, never change
We hardly have Stop & Shops in NYC
there’s one in Glendale, on Fresh Pond,
it’s walking distance from my house
if I was bored I could walk the aisles
looking at the frozen chicken
parts and waiting for someone to waste my time
and Jo I would think fondly about you and your office
crush gripping each other by the hair

~

Dear Cam: I fell asleep in the bath believing
falsely you had sent me dreams
to record while A examined my body for faults
and scars Cam my frequently
gone addressee who I’d dream about
with a more than mild start, like the time Harry
Styles’s car broke down and he surprised a superfan
or when I took a cab to the Dreamhouse and you
were outside picking up your laundry
Who goes to the club with his socks
squared up in a bag?
I guess we do I think of Harry’s hot
infantile but receding hair
plastered with sweat over the hood the fan coming
home to an unreal pop icon in engine grease
an AO3 setup or the meet-
cute of a genderswapped Notting Hill
only your appeal, Jo says, is more Henry Rollins
and down to the tinnitus it’s upsettingly true

~

I watched a half-hour documentary
with footage of a teenaged
you thrashing Winnipeg basements and dreamt of a school of ragtag
forgetful goth characters, like everyone you know in Wednesday
Addams drag
we’re setting up to all go to bed but I’ve decided on everyone
sleeping in my room which just expands forever
all kind of elevated surfaces and chairs,
chaises longues, sofa beds I’m on a surprisingly comfortable pad on the floor
V. badly wants to sleep in the same bed, J. is present, Caro
I have sequenced the genome of dyke drama in this dream of surfaces
something snaps in the mirror world or someone feeds something into
a mirror that they shouldn’t and now we all have to evacuate, quickly,
removing all evidence of ourselves
as we huddle out into the cold part of the story
I turn paper into dust rather than make the mistake
twice with the mirror but then I can’t find which
black mask is mine then I’m looking to generalize
useful knowledge based in a book by EP Thompson but
wait for additions and corrections supplied by Juleon, I wait all night

~

As J. dreams not of linear beds
of lovers but of water coming out
milky, “I thought we
should stop paying rent,” and the cops
watch from a window
outside while they sleep with K., not me I think, different
character, same taunting initial
without scruples I admit to taunting the vacant
hard-up reader of the dream
I’ll taunt from the back of a busted car
I’ll taunt you from the fucking moon
you’ll fucking love it off the chair onto the writhing floor
as we collectively discover how ethics are made of lava
just as in another dream J. was driven
uptown to a hotel while Helen poured wine in their mouth
a different transsexual poet memoirist
menacing crush and ketamine enthusiast oh, is that mean
I’m just observing patterns like the waltz of cruelly
sculptural women across someone's field of hot vision
I’d like to know my own appeal Acker compared
the taste of her cunt to the syrup lining the wafers of hydrox
biscuits I think mine more like tangerine skins
or the bruise on gently fermenting peaches or assy wine
The driver leaves J. on purpose
they’re swimming with Hannah, it’s a race
they lose the goggles and return to the dream hotel
the lobby insists on correctly gendering the goggles
owner though this requires a choice between Mr. and Mrs. Possessor
L. wins out in the end texting that they “got
the goggles back for the angry workers”

~

and now I’m dreaming of fucking L.
except it’s my turn to wear the double-ended dick
I have to solve a large and pressing
problem elsewhere but not before I solve
the problem of being uncharacteristically toppy
then my grandfather is serving many desserts
some are Jewish but I forget which I’m making
coffee for him but half the beans aren't ground at all
in a different dream L. needed his teeth corrected
but protested that this dentist trip had already happened
in the past and I got two virus swabs while escaping
with Christian from a house full of Nazis
the fascists are our roommates, we have to cover
them in shaving cream, then escape with suitcases
full of bank notes that we exchanged so predatorily
for foreign currency that we make off incredibly rich

~

then on December 4 I dream I was hospitalized
at a clinic but I break out of it, sliding into a cold
landscape in other people’s yards and land
it’s the Betty Ford clinic only it’s in Vermont
I can tell cause of the snow and pine
needles and cause everything’s cut
into triangles, there are deer but they
are secret, the hill I’m sliding
down requires secret deer language
and its owner a friendly older white man
comes home but I don’t trust him instead I run
and hide in a copse and write a note
that later I struggle to decipher
but it has to do with the snow and sanctity
of deer language, how you cannot use it to build
or slide down your triangular hill in the dark

~

I know so little about Vermont I can’t
possibly be protective of it, as if I’ve
swapped places with Connie who dreams of New
York Yiddishkeyt setting: the Bronx, a cafe,
a factory, and a lecture hall her acquaintance or more
precisely co-star or addressee had travelled to New
York for archival research the two walked through
an unevenly gentrifying and historically immigrant
neighbourhood like where Connie’s grandfather moved
from Poland before the Shoah stop in a café
of Yiddish speakers drinking hot sweet teas and clear
liquors, basically paint thinner, in tiny glasses the addressee
of the dream tried to make contact with a labor organizer
who under threat of surveillance only reluctantly allowed
C. and her dream companion access to the archives
where their family history was stashed, a guarded
file in the union hall old and crowded with shelves
of loose documents in the dream Connie
could read Yiddish, so she cried the two leave the lecture
hall “talking about like socialism or unions or something”
my grandfather too briefly a socialist
architect before he left Apartheid South
Africa, moved to Montreal
and designed shopping
plazas and sometimes
homes on December 5th I dream
of a march that proceeded slowly to a house
both in Ridgewood and Ottawa, it’s my grandfather’s
house, it’s the object of a protest, we're walking
up Decatur to 60th Ln. and feel assured of our eventual
success inside it’s orange, large and slightly medieval
I could call my Grampa now to ask about
his health and he’d talk about Zero Mostel,
who picked up Dick Cavett and waltzed him
the length of his own stage like puppetry's special goy
but I wouldn’t learn his temperature or the state of his cough

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Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She's the author of two collections: Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021) and A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022). She lives in Queens, NY.

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