Tracey
Lara Mimosa Montes


I admit it: I’m young and from The Valley
which means even a neon sign can do it to me

Like at Lehmann Maupin when I see a Tracey
I admit it: a Tracey Emin can really do it to me

The argon infused aura of August
LA liquor store lighting
the sweat of bed time prose lit up
slurring over emanating

* * *








Downtown there’s another Tracey. I WHISPER TO MY PAST DO I HAVE ANOTHER CHOICE. I contemplate its riddle, blushing, understanding. How far is this from the year 1990, when Juliette Lewis plays a stripper, beautiful but stuck? After getting booed off stage, Lewis runs into the street. Dumb. Wherever she goes, she can’t help but remain lit by the color of her own whorelight: GIRLS. We eat her by her own light. Meanwhile, she’s thinking. Or Being. To be a girl is better than Heidegger. I use the word HEIDEGGER to hide her from her thoughts, as though trash had time to think. White girl trash, such as this Emin, even less. But it’s not like I have a choice. As if in this poem, I had a choice. As if the whole thing could ever be anything but girls flashing their hazards wrecked and sweating, on a stage, thrown. As if it were possible for every BOO-HISS to throw you back into time, to 1990. In a bikini. Blank. Enjambed. Backward. Shy.

* * *






“I’m looking to get what I want.”
Tracey Emin


When I look at a work of art
I want it to make me feel
like I have just seen a poster of Liv Ullmann
        at a supermarket in Chula Vista

When I look at a work of art I want it
to be able to say to me (snarkily) Yeah
so why don’t you write about it in your diary?


When I want a work of art sometimes
I will write about this want in the diary

The prosody of such wants ought to be very “faux-confessional”
if the prosody of a diary is to accurately reflect that of a real diary

In other words
when I want a work of art I’m going to want it
when I want a work of art I’m going to want it
like it’s a Tracey

I’m going to want it as if it were a page
ripped out of some dumb-dumb’s diary
I’m going to want it like I’m Puff Daddy

I am so boring stupid rich that I am actually
going to tear a page out of a dead girl’s diary

when I want a work of art I’m going to want it
like I’m the dead girl         (and you’re the diary)






Lara Mimosa Montes is a PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work has appeared in Triple Canopy, DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, and RECAPS. She currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.