I appreciate the immediacy of Dueñas characterization of a city–its chaos, a many-armed chaos, or a many-ways-visited-upon-the-poet chaos. And it’s for multiple reasons this chaos exists. Like, um, a city is just chaotic by nature. Consider construction of anything, the serpentine relationship between rebar and concrete. The serpent-like relationship when a person is wandering the city. And maybe this chaos is by design: “there’s a dialogue of thought between great men who chew up kites who exercise their power to be everywhere at once.”
And it’s like, “Exactly.” That’s the city. It exists and it’s existing to be a state of mind that keeps edging into the poet’s state of mind. And to what effect?
For me, this is the poem’s magic. The chaos of a mind, the first-person account living within that mind, and how, then, to navigate the city, which has its own mind. Perhaps my reading here reveals the kind of chaos intertwined with the city’s chaos. And the poem complements this formally with prose poetry shifting from bold text (even larger-font text) and normal text weight. I like the crafted claustrophobia of the poem. And amongst this pressure the poet forms her desires. And her rights to form personal desires.