‘White man on Tinder calls me Geisha’
— Nix Thérèse
When a poet can pull off using the title as the first line, I’m almost instantly impressed. It can come off as a lazy move that doesn’t really frame the poem or give anything new enough for us to bother. But here, it creates a sense of urgency. We move quickly from “White man on Tinder calls me Geisha” (which immediately poses the overall conflict) to “& my shadow is a stillborn / & i drag my body behind me” (the consequences). It’s the only tercet in the poem of couplets that acts as the blueprint: we’ll continually be tossing around these ideas of conquest, distance, and violence. The shadow has no movement/life/breath and the speaker can somehow exist without their body, which throws us into the surreal immediately. Yet violent language making us strangers to ourselves is quite familiar to most of us, and that connection grounds us enough to move forward. I’d argue that the newness of the language for this well-known concept only pulls us in more.
When the speaker says, “don’t tell me / that history is a skinless almond,” we must consider how skin can be one of the main markers of time. We’re accosted by almost every skin cream or wash commercial to reverse/prevent the damage we’ve done just by carrying out our day-to-day lives. In fact, they often (unwittingly) make the correlation that to live is to decay. To have no skin inherently implies that there is no blemish to be found, but we know that history has been rewritten to favor those who want us to believe that the blood on their hands was a necessary evil. We know that even the best looking skin can have secrets. This moment begs us to consider that there are truths beyond what is currently brought to light.
Yet the most intense moment of the poem for me is the one we’ve been building towards all along: “I watched a documentary that said / men were the only species / causing death from a distance / distance as killzone: distance as motion: / distance as ownership: if i send you / my body via text / can you let my hunger out, walk it, dog / gone it?” I love how these lines seamlessly form a connection between the larger issue of war and interpersonal relationships. It’s harrowing to consider how often our governments are using bombs, nukes, drones, etc to destroy people who are nowhere near us, their agency stripped so thoroughly in a moment and the immediate impact can only be seen through screens. And once we hit “distance as ownership”, we’re called to reconsider the title itself. While some men are bold enough to use racist language to someone’s face, it’s much easier to send along when there’s space between you. Tinder can put you in contact with those you wouldn’t meet on a regular basis, and this sense of meeting the “other you’ve missed” often reminds us why we avoided them in the first place. When you must push back against white supremacy on a frequent basis, you don’t want to be reminded of it in spaces where you’re seeking to be desired. But desire, like history, isn’t skinless; it’s still informed by everything occurring outside the screen. Throughout the poem, but especially in this moment, we get the feeling that the speaker’s hunger for justice—for both bodies like theirs and their body specifically—may never filled. But the poem’s exploration of why and how this plays out calls us to stomach it with them. Do you feel the growl yet?