Claws in Your Back by Julien Baker with poetry from Hanif Abdurraqib at Eaux Claires IV Julien Baker (Ft. Hanif Abdurraqib)

[Hanif Abdurraqib]
I get the lyric wrong and in my head I rewrite the song to whatever you have newly determined it to be. And I did not know by how you rolled over right as the cardinal, covered in ruins of its labor, drifted away and the tree newly naked and stripped to its barest layer. I only knew, when thinking of Gram Parsons, and how a suit was sown for him when he was twenty-one and on the suit, there were bursts of red poppy flowers and how the resin from the pod of thе poppy makes morphine possible and how Gram Parsons sat undеrneath a dark sky at Joshua Tree when he was twenty-six, and how he had been clean for months but wanted to see the stars puff up, the round cheeks over the sand, which in that hour must have looked like pearls, and how I do not need to tell you that he did not survive the night

[Julien Baker]
Collecting the circles
That tell us how old we are
Beneath our eyelids, oh

Wearing a purple badge
To prove what I did
Pump the vitals out of my wrists

Cause I'm conducting an experiment
On how it feels to die

[Hanif]
And to adorn yourself in the tools of your eventual undoing is not by itself romance, and to wear your demise across your own shoulders is not by itself romance, but, like the poppy, I have become something more dangerous than I was once. And this is how I have learned my heart’s worst fears. How each small misery could be something which takes us away from each other. I knew this way, too. I have dreams about planes crashing and houses on fire and in the dream I am both the watcher and the sufferer. It can be said that this is love. To imagine all of the worst separations. Forgive me, for I am being too literal again. Let me try something else. Love is not the drug itself, but the fluorescent hull that splits the earth in the name of its blooming. Not the drug, but the object so beautiful it demands to be stitched into something which the body can consume. What I meant to say when I could not bring myself to wake you. I imagine the cardinal tears away the layers of that which holds it up to ensure everything underneath is real. You leave and atop my sink a makeup remover holds a memory of you. And the toothbrush dripping the small pond into a contour porcelain holds a memory of you. And the mug on the table with the stain of lipstick shaped like the crescent of a blood moon holds a memory of you. Gram Parsons had his body set on fire at Joshua Tree and today people say the ashes still blow into their hair and their eyes, and God, what a miracle. All I have been trying to say is this: may even the residue of our love find the curve of wind to dance and echo into

[Julien]
Try to stay calm
Cause nobody knows
The violent partner you carry around

With claws in your back
Oh, ripping your clothes
Listing your failures out loud