Longitudes of Longing: Michelle Naka Pierce’s “Beloved Integer”

(Bootstrap Press/PUB LUSH, 2007)

Uncertain of where we are in the matrix of desire, we become unstable points, unexplained phenomena. In “Beloved Integer,” Michelle Naka Pierce calculates intimacy in numbers and names the beloved, beginning with ‘one.’


“You emerge from inertia, and our desires change” (73). “Beloved Integer” diagrams a physics of the physical, where space is durational and time, spatial. Bodies and boundaries are in flux, traveling along points of contact and con/text.


On this grid the specific splices through the general—daily activities cut through theory—raisin bran and Stanislavsky. As Pierce attempts to graph intersections recalled in memory, the tension between time and space peels apart, and the location of any landmark, whether city or body, becomes variable.


“Absence can only exist as a consequence. Can only exist as a consequence of this. Only exist as a consequence of this other” (48). Pierce’s vocabulary and placement are meticulously measured. The numeric cuts through word, writing through distance toward and until.


Tone and rhythm fluctuate, become less incremental, as she moves from the beloved to the landscape of Obaachan, Japan, her father (19). Always lurking is the death within stillness, the peril of becoming fixed.


By inscribing figures Pierce reveals writing as intimate, as an intimation, to write being to intimate or discern. This writing is a “long engagement” (58), a longitude of longing. Each block of text is a quadrant, each quadrant in transit, while figures traverse by train, bus, and plane, roadmap and road (62).


Navigating with GPS in hand, Pierce finds clarity in what is next to, in what is relational. We measure what’s around us to determine where we are.


These measurements are distances.


It is through distance that we arrive.





See M. Perel's interview with Michelle in Tarpaulin Sky