Erotic Things
there is no self just rapture
By Rajiv Mohabir
The texture of wet clay on a throwing wheel
The blue of an eastern bluebird when spring crashes on the heels of winter
Keats’s negative capability has the potential
*
Mistaking your lover for someone else when he turns his back
Exotic sounds like exotic. But not when people call me this
*
The erotic makes sense when we think of jouissance and how that means there is no self just rapture. When I say jouissance, I like the eroticism of it being in French with that final nasal and sibilant. Doesn’t this sound like how a romance novelist would write it—and to me my own auto-colonial reading is not erotic, of French that is. Of English and Spanish too—they sound like colonial coercion, and that’s not erotic.
*
The pharmakon: how snake venom poisons, how the antidote distills from that very venom
The space of indeterminacy
*
Dark-skinned men in short shirts and shorts, men with bubble butts and thick thighs
*
“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.” —Audre Lorde
*
Queers and not fitting in one envelope or one’s shorts
But maybe eros is exotic, and by this, I mean the very textural gesture of the word, what it points to, what we hide in clothes or words
*
The linguistic texture of Bhojpuri, Creolese, and English brush up together—living their taboos together—through the act of emergence despite repression
Secret languages that we speak to each other in
*
The lips when they bite strawberries, how they envelop the red
Swollen strawberry guava. The smell as they rot on the ground—like wine. I remember tramping through a sprawling forest path at Kuli‘ou‘ou Ridge where the forest floor practiced its winemaking. The entire climb was perfumed and that was erotic, the emerald of the mountain, the cloud cover like fog and the turning of sugar into liquor.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry), The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018), and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.
His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and has been a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021, finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir), received the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Currently he is an assistant professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
