from Feed
Me n Leo yakkity yak yak’dabout writer’sblockand the starchy long stroke of quote unquote God on the Meadow Walkand he didn’t know I was fully head over banana peels I mean in Kiehl’sI mean in straight up crappy love with him yet and maybe I didn’teither? Sand crabs poking their bodies & legs post wave Hindsightis Good & Plenty I mean 20/20clearlythe worst Americancandy And what is candy, but a crush?Leo said it’s tangled upin waves in dreams in therapy That writer’s block(or is it god?)comes from being blocked upin other parts of the daysof our livesof our livesof our livesThis is a polysaccharide Effective deflectionRejection heavy,that he’d forgotten what the feelingof a goodidea isBut I’m standing right in front of you?I thought bubbled but never troubledthe airwith my utteranceInstead I said, “this is the part where you ask me for my number”
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- August 28, 2020
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“[Me n Leo yakkity yak yak’d]” excerpted from FEED, by Tommy Pico
Tin House, Portland, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Tommy Pico
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Niqui Carter
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), and Junk (Tin House Books, 2018). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry, and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he’s the winner of a Whiting Award and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literature Prize. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
“A dazzling fusion of culture. Feed is as much about what we consume as how we consume. Pico's lines are ever-growing, ever-expanding. And while we might seem lost in the abundance, the sheer variety, Pico is a skilled enough poet to ground us. ... How Pico pulls all this off is his magic. Feed is engrossing, oddly enlightening and, above all, fun to read.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Funny, irreverent, profound. This book is an ode to love and language and food and what right now sounds like. It’s also a meditation on what it means to belong on/to this planet/universe. Delivered in headlines, texts, conversations, song lyrics, puns, rhymes, and speculation about the possibility of life on other planets, Tommy Pico’s Feed sprawls across time and this country. It is endlessly inventive and stays fun while bringing the heat and weight of a world we’re all helplessly watching burn down. As his character/AKA Teebs says of Oakland rapper Two $hort, the same is true of Tommy Pico in this book and in general: Vigor is the art he argues for.”
—Tommy Orange
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