Tracy Fuad’s “Iterations”

The LARB Quarterly no. 44, “Pressure,” presents a new poem by Tracy Fuad.

By Tracy FuadApril 15, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Iterations

In the hotel lobby girls of nine or ten wore jeweled leotards with open backs and
thin, crisscrossing straps. They were here to cheer or dance. Their coach in a shirt that said 
    koach
spelled with a k. An average dad who had silvered and glittered his mustache.

Above, a dozen screens, a dozen muted weathers.

For years I’d thought you’d sold my book you’d stolen accidentally at my reading in the
    backyard
where we’d first met. In it I had written visit me. Someone bought it at Unnameable and
messaged me a picture of my own inscription and this knowledge I was not supposed to 
    have
had wounded me. It floated up in certain darknesses and bound me. But you told me that 
    it must
have been your sister who had sold it when you moved to Oakland. You showed her to me 
    on
your phone, a version of you with different hair but identical piercings.

On a windowless patio you’d asked about my child, and then there was no space between 
    us.

Beside your bed, the same giclée that hung beside mine. Sterile and monochromatic. A 
    tuba and
a horn. I wondered if it hung in all nine hundred rooms or was just one of several 
    iterations. I
couldn’t stop saying your name.

After you left, a breakfast sandwich that I couldn’t eat. One half marked by my teeth.

I had dreamt of a long spit of land. It was Super Bowl Sunday. I knew you, and then, I 
    knew you.

And the longing descended like a weather front. The kind of change in pressure that
    makes a sky
go green.

It was labile and pronged and it entered me fully.

It had limbs. It took on my shape. Then it took on yours.

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Featured image: Franz Marc. The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol (Das arme Land Tirol), 1913. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection (46.1040). CC0, guggenheim.org. Accessed April 11, 2025. Image has been cropped.