My wife and I are talking about that Herzog movie where they haul a 300 ton boat up a hill in the Peruvian jungle. She is eating some french fries and kneeling in the curly wool of our living room rug. I will not tell you her name. Even in poetry, we deserve to keep some secrets. I will disclose that she does not much like the ripe maroon of ketchup, but sometimes falls completely silent admiring hot sauce, mustard, and mayonnaise, which always slick the creases where her bottom lip meets top. She has seen almost every Herzog movie, and she can prove they’re more interesting to talk about than watch. In the winter, she carries our compact plastic space heater from room to room, creating her own stubborn weather. We agree, you really cannot underestimate a proper spectacle.
This morning, I showed her an optical illusion where you stare at a red circle, close your eyes, and find it turns cyan. The disk of perfect blue floats in the void of your not-vision, eventually doomed to fade, until you wonder if it was all a myth, the way Isabella must have doubted the seductive stories of chocolate and cotton that the conquistador Pizarro whispered in her ear at night, while the king was in Italy playing with swords. Auteurs are nothing if not unusually cruel, forever trying to prove their wounds are the world’s wounds. In the name of nothing but the claim of some dubious blue, they maim and kill their crews, drive actresses mad, and colonize our living rooms. After being bitten by a snake, one of Herzog’s men reportedly cut off his own foot with a chainsaw. We’re supposed to wonder if there’s such a thing as fiction, fact. Astronomers have learned that stars shift blue as they loom into view. Often, I imagine the foot, tumbling opposite the boat, right down the hill, reaching the river, and gradually turning a waxy periwinkle as it floats out to sea.
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Cameron Quan Louie is from Tucson, Arizona. He has received degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and University of Arizona. He has been a Multiplying Mediums Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the McLeod-Grobe Prize for Poetry, and a grant recipient from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. His poems, nonfiction, and erasures have appeared in Entropy, The Margins, Best New Poets, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, jubilat, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Apology Engine, selected by Trace Peterson for the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition, is forthcoming in 2022. You can find him at https://cameronqlouie.com
Grateful acknowledgment to Dirty Beaches and Alex Zhang Hungtai for supplying the title to this poem, track five on their 2011 album, Badlands.