mobile, Alabama
A text inspired by Gabriel Campbell’s painting The Journalist, which in turn made me think of Stuart Reid’s 1918 painting The Arab welcome to the first Handley Page machine to arrive in Palestine, which in turn made me think of Mobile, Alabama.
i.
First came the Romans.
Then the Ottomans, the French,
the British, the Germans,
rode over and wrote their names in sand-
dunes and dunghills, making sacred and blackening churchspires as they came.
Between the weathered sandals of the Constantinople colonel
and the sword-tipped stilettos of the Salome on holiday,
they stampede their shoes up her thighs,
wipe their soles on crotchgrass
soak the streets like hunting grounds.
They will offer up this reliquary on red satin, a single ruby
like a roasted apple rested on a suckling pigs maw—
plucked from India and buried in Maltese gold.
Years later, years in the making,
the Confederates will throw their own Crusade.
On Dauphin Street you can still see where the Union died, like a son,
calling for its mother, still singing the lynch-corpsed Marseillaise for a sun-bleached shroud of a nation,
Red white and blue of Louis, not of Obama the Sun-King & Bush the caravan tyrant of Florida.
Digging up the bloodgold that runs riverlike through the South,
they make a crucifix in sacred yellow wood and set it on fire.
ii.
Josiah is 42 and divorced. He, like Jesus,
enjoys asking women to touch his toes.
I am 24, and the whitest woman to come out of the Holy Land
Since Cesare Borgia. We are two bodies / milk and honey /
standing in a church in the least holy place in America,
Mobile,
Alabama.
Flagland thick and wet, home of Keller
and deathplace of the internet,
the tenth circle of Dante’s hell has a rather fetching view over the Waffle House across the parking lot,
the race riots outside the data centres,
Sam Altman halo’d in a neon tabard.
Josiah leans over, black skin, rabbit foot,
And tells me the cross is fake. He tells me everything here
is fake– mortgages, subpoenas, custody weekends,
the sugared heresies of hotel bars, 32 of the 50 states
are run by birds or aliens or pedophiles, perhaps all three–—
It’s hard to tell at the end of Empire.
Caligula may have married a horse and declared war on the sea,
but at least he wasn’t in the Epstein files.
He tells me the Crusaders never found Jerusalem,
and so Americans invented their own.
America within the dream of Rome,
Rome inside a bone-box,
but a box is not a home—
I look at God and fail to see how someone thought he would be safer in Alabama.
This is fucking sick