Ada McCartney

Extraction Song

“Extracting is stealing … a part of colonialism and conquest.” -Leanne Simpson

“Grandmother, when did you first learn the songs you carry” -Tanaya Winder

Take your dark secrets, draw them from the space between your saddest country’s ballads
beyond the death of your beloveds beyond the addictions, the laxatives.
What began in the midst of bearing
in children the wandering
or lazy eye
I’ve heard is born from exposure to an adult human penis too close, too soon, or legs who betray
you—
run, run, run with your fucked up colon and when the wind will no longer take you I will hum
and hold your wrinkle-soft-always-trambling-trample-nervous hands and avoid writing poems
full of promises like the wet empty phlem of your wheezing
lungs and I will pray with each exhale that this oral pleasure fixation could render
no harm. Locate the wish for death balancing between your lips and howl at the waning
moon that long, sonorous and wailing blue note
I will sing along with you a fluting melody of embroidered
flowers that you can no longer see, but may remember
discreetly those deep pastel violets proliferate on a fabric so white as to contain
all your many daughters’ shame-red animal blood
Revisit those hellfire brimstone bible passages that turn you
on and dance in the passion of sadomasochisms. When you hear belting
hypocrisy honeying the voice of that pyramid scheme preacher, imagine
him in assless chaps or sagging tube socks and black polyester garters with a signature
leather riding crop and in that perverse daydream tell him
where it hurts, how much and where you want to be spanked.
Look at all the ways you give
up your power in crisis. Notice all the ways
you conjure and conform to propagated
crises, to the proverbial need that arises.
Notice how the blind eye turns inward just so. Notice the bones
which are brittle with what you endure and inflict and demure. Denial is a river that will drown
her.
Remember when there were gods for everything.
“We are all survivors and we
are all perpetrators”
said the pot to the kettle.

What I know About English

Is that it’s a language of little mercy. It’s a man thing. It’s a little scratchy, takes some breaking
in, but it’s got a lot of pockets, so I wear it anyway.

It names my geography “clavicle,” “iris,” “vagina,” (“shame mouth” elsewhere) and “dimpling.”
Etymology is a thousand mouths gaping from a hundred different rivers. It’s full of machinery,
dammed in many places; ICYMI we rarely move beyond New Speak these days.

Acronyms for everything. And Jargon for Jargoning. We’re so predictable. Dicks, predatory,
delectable.

My colonized tongue feels heavy and populated with verbs. Its root pulses, swallowing. Sit, slit,
drive, dive, tense and try releasing. Questions like, why are you so reluctant to let go? The sound
of falling snow. The ____ stare and bawdy derision of the un-expected, un-respected ‘No’.

By comparison, Japanese feels supple whispering like a bamboo forest of leaves like a cherry
blossom breeze like nuclear tea. How I look for it everywhere, though it is not native to me.

My throat constricts, I trace the tension through a canyon riverbed of nerve bundles wanting for
some movement lubrication down the spine through the gulley of the pelvis into the shame
mouth red and raw from all the naming

echoes carry outward towards the knee joints, crack. Anointing something doesn’t automatically
make it sacred.

English is in my body. Is my body. It’s stiff like church shoes in the country. It remembers how
to sing but doesn’t practice too often. I am a student of unlearning borg hive mind in
hyperdreams—

wiring and rewiring. I find the mezcla Español y otras cosas wave vie get ghost while painting
over whitewash with graffiti.

A mouse so startles me—
embarrassed squeak. Can’t see that it’s a mouse, the scurry made me think “Rat! EEK!”

Year of metal rat, year of emperors, other things that creep, and many years since mildewed
basement mire of earwigs and festering bottles with an English that just kept mashing
buttons—

roaches scattering in the language of sudden light.

Speaking of Home

Boom buggies roll by.
Twenty plain dresses dry
on a clothesline.
2020 or 1999.

What do the horses think of so much bass? Church wagon tithe
tied to the neighbor’s hitching post heavy rustle whine of foals growing into their prime.
Expressions of approval and disapproval are not permitted. Restore order. Big girls don’t cry.

What if there is no such thing as Real Time?
“Grief is a kind of time” writes Sun Yung Shin.
It folds and falls and finds a way to weave
Read Thread or, Caroline’s Vicuña, embroidered pillowcase khipu
cradling curlers, all adornment and seed
into a cocoon of dreams. Then, it unravels, and I fall into new wet wings. To revisit the moment
of reckoning
Arrive Alive Angry
Bone deep and reeling. I pray with the soles of my feet.
Knowing what I didn’t ask to know. The point is to survive. Or, live with focus.
Have Mercy.

You lack confidence
I see you, don’t give
up—

I press way too hard when I write and when I sleep.
Jaw grinds chipped teeth. Mojo
gone missing.\
Blue Pontiac. Blue Buick. Blue Chrysler. Blue me.
Claiming and reclaiming.

Mom says I do too much says it’s a flaw inherited matrilineally. A name for it is
Daughter. Subaru. Bicycle. Imperial. Pioneering. Bleeding.

What are the ethics of naming? There’s a certain tenor to an afternoon when it’s raining.

In vertical dissonance I am less distant than distance
Bioacoustics denote a whole mood
time signature:
my heart thrum-hum-da-bum-thumping at 110 beats per minute

Kuku Kukuwa Kai E
unseen bird sings

Last night I worked at untangling the strawberries and nasturtium from a blanket of wily mint
which I ought to transplant, seeding lemon balm, and prickle weeds—
Ants!

There was a place I lived once where all through the night while I tried to sleep
they would crawl
unrelenting, single file or zigzagging across obstacles, the tense
width of my bone-tired, unsleeping body, across collections of books, loose paper, and stained-
glass trinkets

Sometimes I wake suddenly to that singular incessant feeling and want to peel off my skin.

Ada McCartney is a poet, performer, and teaching artist. Ada holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and a BA from Kalamazoo College. Some of her favorite performances include “Tongue of a Bird” at Festival Playhouse, the inaugural Extreme Future Festival in L.A., “Survival Skills” with Laughing Pig Theatre, and “Inherent Worth and Dignity” at Arts Intersection. She is an editor of the anthology More Revolutionary Letters: A Diane di Prima Tribute (Wisdom Body Collective, 2021) and the author of cunt poems (In Process, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Plants and Poetry Journal, The Bombay Gin, Patchwork, Phoenix Dance Observer, and elsewhere. @aa_mccartney on Twitter and www.aamccartney.com.