DOMINATION STORY By Nico Lee Cary

The Rising Phoenix Review

Dec 21

DOMINATION STORY

To dissociate you need a body

To be a body is a hard science

Hard science is measuring justice in units of citizen

Citizenship is the surrendering of your other bodies

for the false hope of arrival

Citizenship is an umbilical noose —

I dissociate

~~~

To be a dominated body,

I must first be dominated into a body,

the flat earth of me,

chemically stripped

from other dimensions.

~~~

To stop the violence,

I must be remade as something

you will understand as human,

— I must commit ecocide.

~~~

Once we're both implicated,

Domination is the

curse of being a body

(as opposed to, for instance, a body of being)

and believing justice is what happens

when that body is no longer brutalized;

believing freedom is what happens when there

is a shared definition of sovereignty or

a new proximity to choice

because everyone forgot the original curse.

But I am still left with a body,

its own self made rubicon —

a haunted miracle of

scorched lungs, and dammed waterways

capitulating to a hylomorphic belief that

we've come too far

to be anything else.

By Nico Lee Cary

Biography:

Nico Cary comes from a large Black and Chinese family – like, grandmother 12th of 12 math. He is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and mindfulness teacher. He received his BA from UC Berkeley's Interdisciplinary Studies Field School, specializing in cognitive linguistics. He is a Garrison Institute Fellow, and his multimedia installations on processing climate grief have been featured at the Smithsonian and Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco.