Refuse to Settle

Tommy Pico has published four books of poems in four years: IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017),  Junk (Tin House Books, 2018), and Feed (Tin House Books, 2019). This tetralogy is primarily located in Brooklyn and the Viejas Reservation where Pico grew up, as well as the online worlds that have become inseparable from everyday life. Like long phone texts, direct messages, and social media feeds, each of the four is a book-length poem that also draws its form from epic storytelling modes in Indigenous cultures, including Kumeyaay Bird Songs, while fragmenting them for an accelerating world.

If Frank O’Hara’s poetry has frequently been portrayed as “I do this I do that,” it might be possible to describe Pico’s book IRL as an “I click this I click that” poem. To “click” here means the whole range of life on the Internet, just as for O’Hara “I do this” refers to a broad span of activities, from looking at art, to having sex, to drinking a Coke. One of the significant breakthroughs of the New York School of poetry, of which O’Hara was a leading member, was seamlessly folding into its poems the consumer products and art of the postwar United States.

Similarly, one of the most groundbreaking aspects of IRL is its integration of online culture. The irony of the title “in real life” is the blurring of digital and physical—the “real” embedded in an acronym used primarily online. Whereas in “Personism: A Manifesto” O’Hara described a poem’s method of address as similar to picking up a phone and calling someone, IRL updates the technology to texting and internet messaging—usually, as with O’Hara, a friend or lover. Of course many contemporary poets utilize the internet in creating their work. But IRL doesn’t appropriate the Internet, doesn’t quote from it, mirror it, or use it as a mode of distribution. Rather, it translates into poetry a life continually spent online until the internet moves offline, or as Hito Steyerl writes in “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”: “The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment.” This is also known as post-Internet: when the Internet permeates daily life and culture. Pico’s poetry embodies and speaks this pervasive electronic domain; it blends online and offline: “I see so much/text all day.”

In the process, the poem—and the various identities it performs—becomes the partial product of technologies that shape the self. This includes personas and avatars, which Pico plays with over the course of all four books, especially his more performative side, nicknamed “Teebs.” There’s a reason why the collaged figure on the cover of IRL is wearing a mask. The book bemoans a lack of privacy at the same time that it celebrates a form of exhibitionism that is clearly liberating. Internet culture makes self-expression potentially limitless, yet IRL yearns for physical presence, as well as a space for direct political agency, while remaining immersed within an online world. The book’s form resembles an extended text message, right down to its line lengths, acronyms, fragmentation, and clipped communication.

I look up at blinking string lights
crisscrossing the sky wtf r u DOING
with yr life? Less
Mary Oliver and more Mary
Magdalene, in that language
is a garden tended by succeeding
generations Flowers watered,
weeds pulled But words
change n rules change How
“hate” was pronounced more
like “hot” Really seething
I mean seeing something adds
to its poetry The conquerors
invade the narrative n just mow
the whole thing My colonial mind
So that I’m at this party shoutin
over (ugh) dub step abt Mary
Magdalene n historical
revisionism I heard on this
comedy podcast instead of the
changing nature of Frog
in Kumeyaay trickster stories
bc they’re gone n I never learned
them Mary in the sense that
u live yr life n after u die, writing
lives on—says whatever
it wants about you. Like
leaving a party alone and
catching the train n rem-
ember every dumb ass thing
u said?

 

There are no particularly representative passages in Pico’s books because, like a life, each is its own big, interconnected thing, and because, especially in the twenty-first century, each moves so quickly. This speed can result from the conditions of hyper-capitalism, as well as be part of a strategy to resist categories and containment. It is impossible to live without these contradictions. Nevertheless, this passage from fairly late in IRL illuminates many of the book’s concerns. It may incorporate other texts from or to the self, such as “wtf r u DOING/with yr life” (a command or an interrogative?), yet these aren’t separable from the overall form of address. The possible alternative—“Kumeyaay trickster stories”—have been lost, mostly as a result of cultural genocide but also because of the movement of Indigenous populations into urban environments in the decades after WWII as part of a relocation program sponsored by the US government to encourage people to abandon the reservations. Pico left the Viejas Reservation to attend college on the East Coast.

“Really seething/I mean seeing something adds/to its poetry” is a device Pico repeats in all four books. It mirrors the autocorrect function that occurs when rapidly texting on a smartphone at the same time that Pico clearly intends both the words “seething” and “seeing” within a larger context that is social and political (and aesthetic) yet fits within the palm of one’s hand and lodges language in the body. The speed and immediacy of Pico’s form also allow for a nonlinearity that will become especially pronounced by the time of Junk and its approximation of a Twitter feed. Mary Oliver and Mary Magdalene rub shoulders (earlier in IRL it was Susan Sontag and Sonic the Hedgehog, which would seem to indicate that the associations are as much aural as conceptual) in a passage that touches on the erasure of history and the self, on how the erasure of the former can also lead to the latter, and that this is not history in general but a colonial history from which there are few if any escape routes, including the backyard Brooklyn bar or apartment with its string of decorative lights. Despite the roaming, digital technology, place registers relentlessly here and throughout Pico’s poetry: from backyard, to party, to subway, with the substratum of a struggle between colonizer and colonized. What’s said is immediately recalled, as memory becomes another location as well.

This is even more pronounced in Nature Poem. Right from the start there is more naming, more places, more memories, more history, more identifications: “I’m a weirdo NDN faggot” (“NDN” is an abbreviation for Native Indian) and “I’M FROM THE KUMEYAAY NATION.” Simultaneous with these locating declarations are Pico’s border crossings in all senses of the word: “but I don’t want to be an identity or a belief or a feedbag. I wanna b/me,” with that second, shortened “b” signaling the freedoms allowed by a blurring of real and online life, of creating an identity as much as having one imposed, of being able to slip away. In “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” Gloria Anzaldúa writes:

Art and la frontera intersect in a liminal space where border people, especially artists, live in a state of “nepantla.” Nepantla is the Náhuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity.

Nature Poem inserts history, whether personal or shared, in a more contextual way than IRL, which in turn creates moments of foreground and background not completely unlike the nature poetry (and art) Pico is so adamantly against: he would “gladly piss on the grass of/the park of poetic form.” Pico seeks to denaturalize nature, and with it identity and history, because for marginalized people in the United States these are the shared receptacles for nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

In Nature Poem, Pico begins to fill in some of the details, most of which are meant to deromanticize and problematize what it means to be Indigenous, queer, male, urban, rural, assimilated, or resistant. Every difference contains a difference within it. This effort is synonymous with denaturalization: dismantling what dominant ideologies seek to package as common sense, natural, inevitable, true. This is one reason why Fredric Jameson famously proclaimed that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” so entrenched had capitalism seemingly become as the only possible economic system after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Accompanying the freedom of self-creation is the feeling of being untethered, and Pico wrestles with this dynamic, especially in Nature Poem. The book both delineates and eludes categories, even in its form: it mixes lines of poetry with bursts of prose that indicate a refusal to be confined or summarized (Feed will return to this structure). It also includes brief considerations of “Malibu” by Hole, “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, and “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman as part of its larger cultural mashups. It reproduces a text exchange between Pico and writer Angel Nafis. It provides details regarding the post-contact history of the Kumeyaay tribe and the current reservation. Descriptions of life on and around the Viejas Reservation appear sporadically throughout Pico’s books, although the speaker never remains in one place for too long, a gesture reflective of centuries of colonial displacement, cultural eradication, and the speed of social media:

Like poison oak or the Left Eye part in “Waterfalls”
you become a little bit of everything you brush
against. Today I am a handful of raisins and abt 15 ppl on the water taxi.

When my dad texts me two cousins dead this week, one 26 the other
30, what I’m really trying to understand is what trainers @ the gym
mean when they say “engage” in the phrase “engage your core”
also “core”

restless terms batted back and forth.

Rest is a sign of necrosis. Life is a cycle of jobs. The biosphere is alive
with menthol smoke and my unchecked voicemails. I, for one, used to
believe in God
and comment boards

I wd say how far I am from my mountains, tell you why I carry
Kumeyaay basket designs on my body, or how freakishly routine it is to
hear someone died.

Pico’s poetry is one of constant misdirection “evading an occupying/force.” The self is a contagion, the body an occupied landscape; yet a less colonized territory and culture can be carried in or on the body as well. The world of Pico’s poetry is deeply interconnected: poison oak and pop songs, God and message boards, life and death. This may be why a “core” is a perplexing notion amid dispossession, and it is not the only “restless” term in his poetry: in fact, most substantial nouns are. “There is no such/as ‘Indian,’” he writes in IRL. As he does here, Pico obsessively references food throughout all four books, and frequently humorously, although his own cravings for sugar and junk food run parallel with the high rates of diabetes among Indigenous populations in the United States and the way reservations were purposefully located on the least arable lands, yet ones that in the twentieth century turned out to be rich with resources such as oil, coal, and uranium, setting off another round of attempts at disempowerment and expropriation. His references to food also run parallel to the ubiquity of online life: not for nothing are streams of digital information called feeds, much of it non-nutritive when not outright harmful.

Elsewhere in Nature Poem water is described as precious for tribes in Southern California’s deserts, but in the excerpt above Pico is literally floating on it while riding a New York City water taxi. These self-acknowledged contradictions and cognitive dissonances abound in Pico’s poetry, giving it a deep resonance and complexity along with his own version of John Keats’s idea of “negative capability”: “but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of meaning/isn’t ultimately that different from a poem,” Pico writes near the end of the book. Living within as between two (or more) worlds means neither feels completely like home, or nature, or natural. This is an intersectional question of geography and ethnicity, of sexuality and class. “Queering what counts as nature is my categorical imperative” declares Donna Haraway in “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies,” in which she attempts to explode conventional approaches to thinking about nature, the human subject, and knowledge formation. For Haraway, intersectionality reaches into the microbe. The jarring juxtapositions that occur throughout Nature Poem are an indication that nothing is contained in itself, but exists only in relation. Everything is in addition to everything else.

Despite all of this talk about transgressing borders and disrupting categories, it is important to emphasize the humor, playfulness, love, affection, goofiness, and affirmations in Pico’s poetry. He asserts his queerness, his Indigenous heritage, his love for gummy bears, his talent for karaoke, his devotion to his friends. He describes having a lot of fun (and sex). As part of an Indigenous population that has been administered, bureaucratized, and physically forced into what were meant to be open-air prisons and given high salt, sugar, and carbohydrate food rations (when they were given any food at all), Pico resists codification and ossification, and this struggle transpires in both the form and the content of his work. If IRL reads as a long text message or DM, parts of which might thread through Grindr or OkCupid, Nature Poem feels closer to Instagram with its framing, its imagism, its prose-like horizon lines, and its deep focus in which history and ecology serve as lived background and context. In fact, it ends with a reference to Instagram: “all across Instagram—peeps are posting pics of/the sunset.” It’s the so-called beauty of so-called nature filtered through social media, algorithms, surveillance, corporate control, and—more optimistically—community.

This schema would pair Junk with Twitter, and sections of it read like a Twitter feed: fragmentary, jokey, incisive, and quippy. It is the most discontinuous of the four books: “Thoughts//jamming jagged and panicked into the next.” It is also the most performative in an overall body of work that takes the performance of the self seriously, strategically, and frequently with tongue firmly planted in cheek. In fact, toward the end of Junk, Pico directly addresses “Teebs, the bratty diva, my alter ego.” Shedding some of the historical context found in Nature Poem, Junk dives into the constantly distracted present. Full of Twitter-esque zingers and summations, and a bit more judgmental than his previous work (social media incubates disdain), the book-length poem careens line to line with no interruptions for seventy-two pages and with only its couplet form to contain it. In this collapse of space and time, “junk” becomes a little bit of everything: food, male genitalia, a store, stuff (but not garbage—perhaps to distinguish it from A. R. Ammons’s own book-length poem in couplets), life, the self, something beautiful (but not pretty), history, “a relief map of yr traumas,” and, again referencing Ammons, “the poem of our time.”

Pico also associates junk with history, which his poetry seeks to reclaim and rewrite. It inherits the records of colonial conquest and ruptures them. Its very forms are skeptical of narrative, and there’s an edge and aggressiveness to them, which are just as frequently directed inward. His is less a documentary poetry than one of the absurd, with the pain, humor, and emphasis on the corporeal that accompany it. Pico’s New Yorker profile mentions that he originally studied pre-med as an undergraduate with the intention of returning to his reservation to help with health issues before realizing that the problem was structural and much more enormous than one person could solve. This bifurcation between his life in New York City and his family and friends on the Viejas Reservation in Southern California runs like a fault line through his work, including language use. “Objectively, my father is a tribal chair-//man and I’m his speech writer” is one of the most incongruous moments in all four books in the way that it steps outside of itself as well as invokes a much more official and instrumental form of discourse and institutions, one that his poetry generally seeks to upset. For very good reasons, institutions—as distinguished from communities—are otherwise treated skeptically, and sometimes hostilely, in Pico’s work.

Junk doesn’t report quite as much on reservation life as the previous two books do, but it does remain focused on the rights of Indigenous people and, in particular, land occupation. It also sustains an attack on the separation of high and low cultures, and it turns up the volume on class critique. It mocks the conventional lyric poem and its special little moments of transcendence. Pico describes how karaoke and voice lessons freed his self-expression as much as therapy and possibly even poetry. If he writes in Nature Poem that, “I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of Garbage//by A. R. Ammons,” in Junk, “I write my version//of the poem Replacing the unimportant gods w/ peanut butter/cookies and ‘Apollo’ with ‘Shake Shack’ or ‘fracking.’” Junk in particular moves through a polluted, consumer landscape with a mix of delight, horror, condemnation, and on-to-the-next-one attitude. But beneath it all is a sense of loss, an elegy for something never fully possessed in the first place.

                      Writing is witness—in ink revelation stays My
therapist says um, what? My bank says overdraft fee My bffs

are plethora My health has its hand on its hip, looking mighty
impatient I accidentally type BOOL instead of BOOK n suddenly

I’m writing a BOOL It’s hard to date someone with no sense of
play but probs harder to date someone who won’t stop I’m

sorry I turn everything into a punchline—the grief is loud, but
laffs are louder I feel something dark pulling me down, as sure

as I feel the ancestors yanking me up I will stop writing abt the
conflict of my body when it goes away Consequently I can never

sleep—It’s too dark in there Junk is scary bc this cd be the end,
sang into a megaphone and the megaphone is a BBQ joint I’ve

struck a chord you say, leaving the table Pulled pork is my
favorite Who the hell eats a sandwich with a knife and fork?!

Every fight is composed mostly of not the night in question
What I meant to say was I’m not yr dad, dick Well what I meant

to say was I’m not the kids who made fun of you for having
tortillas at lunch, dummy You are the kind of person who keeps

a white shirt white I am literally guac stains A snip across our
class difference I tried being fancy once, with the white shorts

but then I sat in orange Fanta on the train.

Pico’s description of writing in ink as a form of witness and revelation is also a writing of and on the body—as both tattoo and the way the nonwhite body writes and is written on. The “Kumeyaay basket designs” tattoos he mentions in Nature Poem are a form of bodily inscription that anchor him to place and tradition, however displaced and untraditional his poetry can be. At the same time, Pico’s poetry is clearly interested in mixing territories and their inhabitants, as the passage above features grief and laughter, parents and children, down and up, self and other, pristine and stained, rich and poor. The constant interruption built into the couplet form makes all relations veer, and Pico further interrupts the flow with more internal dialogue rendered in italics. On a practical level, couplets are a way of organizing so many different kinds of material. “I” and “my” (and “our”) teeter at the edge of line breaks as essentialized notions of identity are destabilized and put into play. This is where freedom and precarity—economic, social, cultural—meet, with language partaking in this slippage.

Couplets bring a visual consistency that mirrors the look of social media platforms, which in their circulation of images and information come closer to democracy than most current versions of it, except to the degree that this data—and the free labor that produced it—is ultimately meant to profit the corporations that host these platforms. This is the new colonialism, a “communicative capitalism” as Jodi Dean describes it, and it takes a poetry as fast and widely referential as Pico’s attempt to comprehend it. A self is sold back to itself after its thoughts, desires, and articulations in various digital domains are scraped, strip-mined, and outright stolen for profit. This process has never been more instantaneous or more lucrative, and it may be one reason why Pico does not dwell on anything at length: it is a way to avoid containment and commodification. There is only time, and not much of it, especially in an age of ecological nightmares, and publishing four book-length poems in four years highlights the urgency driving Pico’s work.

Feed is the least formally structured of Pico’s four books, and in that sense is a bit reminiscent of messier digital platforms like blogs, GeoCities, or Myspace before the social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter put everyone’s information and images into uniform boxes. Feed shares with Nature Poem a hybrid mode mixing poetry and prose, fragments and longer passages; and like Nature Poem, it ranges widely over history, politics, and geography. At the same time, of Pico’s four books, Feed is the least concerned with documenting online life; instead, it narrates social encounters in a variety of locations, including the transit between them. As a result, parts of Feed read like a diary, and a tour diary at that, after the success of Pico’s poetry and his vibrant reading style placed him in high demand as a performer—“Leapfrogging gig to gig.” Without a larger organizing construct, parts of Feed also read like notebook jottings, with scattered thoughts and descriptions given a separate line or two. Yet Pico’s central concerns have remained consistent: food, Indigenous experience both personal and shared, sex, online life, friendship, and popular culture. And like the previous three volumes, Feed is a book-length poem, with the work fusing to a larger life. But more than a life, this is also a world and a universe: “Has it been SEVEN years? 1492? It was literally 69 billion years BC.”

At the same time, a few different motifs woven through Feed help bind the book together. The first is personalized descriptions of nineteen songs sprinkled throughout the text, beginning with Beyoncé’s “XO” and ending with “Up the Ladder to the Roof ” by the Supremes; each are introduced with the word “Track” followed by a number. (Nature Poem’s related song exegeses are much fewer and more extended.) Also appearing throughout Feed are direct addresses that begin “Dear reader”—a pre-social media salutation. In a book that addresses the distinction between being lonely and being alone, these epistolary moments briefly shift the spotlight from Pico in a way similar to the lyrics in Beyoncé’s “XO,” and especially its video with its focus on everyday people at Coney Island, which may be why it’s the one song he discusses twice. Another element threaded through Feed are common and scientific/Latin names for plants found on New York City’s High Line, a public park built on an abandoned elevated freight rail line. Each reference to a set of plants is prefaced with “in three voices: like a braid,” creating a potential chorus comprised of nature, Pico, and classifying systems. One of the locations for Feed, and an example of how nature is never natural in Pico’s work, the High Line is a place for Pico to describe personal and historical endings and beginnings.

News headlines—“mass graves of immigrants found in texas”—flash periodically. Unlike the other repeated elements, these interrupt the book more than unite it. Feed may seek reconciliations, first and foremost with self, as well as with lovers, friends, and the desire to survive; yet the language still moves disjunctively. It refuses to settle.

Poems light up corridors of the mind, like food.

I grew up on a food
desert, a speck
of dust on the map of the United
States—an Indian reservation east of San Diego in a valley surrounded
by mountains that slice thru the clouds like a loaf
where the average age of death is 40.7 years old.

I am 34.

I live in the busiest city in America.

I am about to eat an orange.

Every feed owes itself to death. Poetry is feed
to the horses within me.

[in three voices, like a braid: Gansevoort Woodland 2]
shadbushes, Amelanchier; am-meh-LANG-kee-er
Japanese clethra, Clethra barbinervis; KLETH-ruh bar-bin-ER-vis
Dawn viburnum, Viburnum x bodnantense; vi-BER-num bod-nant-
EN-see

Poetry is a form of nourishment based on need, yet one that can turn into a choice. This interplay between need and choice has been important to all four books, but only in Feed does it become clearly articulated. It can be difficult to escape need when one is always hungry, as Pico admits to being. This is both metaphorical and very much real, having grown up on a “food desert” where material plenitude is experienced as clouds imagined in the shape of bread. This interplay between need and choice is also haunted by death when the average lifespan on the Viejas Reservation is less than forty-one years, so that the urgency of Pico’s work becomes an escape from death and a galloping toward it in an unending cycle of attachment and need. How, then, to break this cycle? Moreover, the idea of feed no doubt refers to current social and economic conditions and their acceleration toward extinction events, whether of cultures or species, including the human. A world driven by consumption can only in the end devour itself.

In general, Feed is more reflective, and at times more essayistic and memoiristic, than Pico’s previous three books, while retaining a “Palimpsest/style,” with both words emphasized. Scientifically driven discussions of the likelihood of life on other planets become conflated with the possibility of finding true love. The reader learns of Pico’s parents’ divorce and his battle with eating disorders when he was younger. There are snippets of conversations with a therapist. There is less talking to himself. Whether all of this reflects the tetralogy’s closure or the next chapter of Pico’s writing life remains to be seen. Toward the end of Feed, he declares:

I don’t have much of anything figured out, but I do know to be
indigenous is not to be a miracle of circumstance but to be the golden light of relentless cunning.

In other words, for the hard-earned wisdom—and agency—Pico has achieved over these four books, the emphasis remains on process, play, and a degree of subterfuge, especially when “No territory will ever satisfy me.” Or perhaps the desire is to reconceive territory as something other than a form of ownership and categories as less circumscribing and oppressive. The inherent instability of poetic language makes it a useful tool for exploring this, as the speed of both the form and content of all four books is simultaneously a survival technique and a means to thrive.

While this form might at times seem to encourage the surface-level skimming that often occurs in reading online feeds, it rewards attention to the details, such as when Pico splits with a line break the false—and forcibly imposed—union of “United/States.” Within the context of the nascent nation-state and embryonic international law, the first “illegal immigrants” in the American Southwest were white settlers moving into the territory currently designated Texas but which in the mid-nineteenth century was part of sovereign Mexico. The result was a law issued in 1830 by the Mexican government banning US immigration into the area, which was summarily ignored. The phrase “Remember the Alamo” has been handed down through US history as a catchphrase for the fervent defense of place and even homeland; but at the time of that military battle in 1836, the Alamo Mission was in Mexican territory. Previously, it had been used by the Spanish to help subdue the local Indigenous population, which itself was the product of movement and intermixing. After all, the Aztecs who previously conquered what became central Mexico originated from the north, perhaps not far from the Kumeyaay. History is another word for the chronicling of migrations. A mix of ethnicities and cultures—and flora and fauna—suffuses the Mexico–US border, and the national demarcations established between the two countries in 1848 created an arbitrary division within this thick history, one that went right through the lands inhabited by the Kumeyaay.

In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa describes the consciousness resulting from this intermixing of peoples and cultures: “From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer.” And while she derives her theory from growing up in South Texas, a borderland need not necessarily be an area blurring the boundaries between, or creating a third space within, two countries or cultures. It can equally function as a metaphor, while nevertheless remaining rooted in material conditions. “I consider myself a mestiza multiculturalist teacher and writer informed by my identity as a Chicana Tejana dyke from a working-class background,” Anzaldúa writes in the essay “The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Movement.” Different elements in pluralized identities are emphasized depending on the context; in turn, the fluidity of identity puts categories and labels in flux—and at risk. While this flexibility can be seen as a strength, it is also important to understand the threat it presents, and therefore the backlash it frequently provokes; in his work, Pico stresses the danger to his body not only as a person of Indigenous descent, but also as queer and from a background of poverty and truncated lifespans.

Another part of the wisdom Pico achieves in Feed must inevitably involve food, which has remained an obsession from the very beginning. Distinguishing itself from previous books, Feed contains sketches of healthy recipes for ceviche and tacos alongside Pico’s more usual references to Swedish Fish and Sbarro. One of the book’s scientifically oriented passages describes how insulin works, echoing Pico’s initial field of study in college and his desire to improve conditions on the Viejas Reservation. Seeking to transform hunger and attachment into interconnectedness, Feed makes reconciliation a primary theme and gives hunger a spiritual component.

As in life, nothing is fully resolved at the end. Pico’s four books have followed him through the seasons, and in Feed, “Spring is a season of reconciliation.” These reconciliations also entail recognizing—and sometimes healing—the spaces in between. Just as importantly, reconciliation does not mean relinquishing an ongoing need for resistance or autonomy. Feed makes a series of returns to friends, family, and place in order to move on to whatever comes next: a personal and collective future both open-ended and under threat. There is freedom in movement, yet movement is never free from ethics or economics, as the forced migrations of Indigenous and enslaved peoples explicitly demonstrate. A sense of exile can be internal as well as territorial.