Alex Cuff, Common Amnesias

 

The road to becoming lessdisgusting is a long one but doable
Is what my Tinder profilesays
I’m on the toilet swipingleft and right
I schedule an event in myGoogle Calendar for October
Hello from March thingsaren’t so great
I try to write a poem andam like oh hi mom and dad
All my poems are about ashame so deep I didn’t shit for two weeks in
    college
The field is dead orbuilt over or really far away or too expensive or
    there’s not enough time
I give myself my firstenema (“DESIRE”)

Thefull-length poetry debut by Brooklyn poet and No, Dear cofounding editorAlex Cuff, following Family, A Natural Wonder (Reality Beach, 2017) and ITry Out A Sentence to See Whether I Believe (Ghost Proposal, 2020), is Common Amnesias (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024). Set in fourpoem-sections—“Family, A Natural Wonder,” “How Are Your Bowels?,” “Even RobocopDreams of His Assassins” and “I Try Out a Sentence to See Whether I Believe”—thequartered accumulations that make up Common Amnesias document a clusterof first-person statements, clarifications, declarations and explorations,composed as monologues against the potential for disappearing completely. “I writesentences while standing / Because I have sprayed dissolved magnesium / Allover my lower body,” part of the second section writes. The poems are loose,fragmented, intimate, declarative and ragged, declaring themselves, howeveruncertain, as a point of being. “I dream the Guggenheim Museum drifts down theEast River on a barge / Followed by the 6th Avenue Jefferson branchof the library,” she writes, as part of the opening sequence, “The subject ofmy anxiety shifts and lands on what is most socially palpable / I take theadvice of several friends who say it is ok to not get out of bed // Thecontradiction of my own brain    takeit easy girl    get the fuck off thefloor [.]”

I have time
I eat a burrito at theParade Grounds
Go to the dollar store
Find a glass bowl with alid for school lunches
I spend the monthabstaining
Abstain from alcohol inJuly
Abstain from alcohol formost of July
I purchase a blue translucentplastic spray bottle from Duane Reade
I make this purchase withgreat hope and promise
Spray my thighs indissolved magnesium
I infuse herbs and drinktea
Tulsi & wood betony
Yellow dock & fennel
Burdock & prickly ash
I have time on my hands
I lose ground and wrestle
I mistake privilege forsymptoms
I mistake the outside forthe inside (“How Are Your Bowels?”)

I’mfascinated by Cuff’s curious accumulations and linguistic twirls and twists, curlicuesof sound, texture and meaning in lovely, small phrase-gestures, offeringintimate fractures and confession. There is something about Alex Cuff’s workthat feels closer to work produced through Futurepoem, somehow, than with uglyduckling (although perhaps my perception, from this geographic distance, may beflawed); it is through the ongoing and fragmented lyric narrative fracture thatdistracts, I suppose, one that holds despite every suggestion that it probably shouldn’t.As the second poem-section ponders: “I meditate on the relationship betweenconstipation and fear of a lover’s / fear of anal [.]” Or, as she includes inthe final sequence:

I read a story about aman who struggles to support his consumptive wife
    and her long ropes of hair by digginggraves and collecting scrap metal.
I thought it was a badstory but find myself wondering where I can get a
    wife with long ropes of hair.
Consumptive or noteveryone I know is dying.
I cross dye thingsgreen from my to-do list.
I am in the produce aisleat Key Food.
I am hushed by a man whohas his hands deep in the bananas.
I make synaptic space forfuture threats.
I see sap in the trees soI tap them.