In Retrospect, Blackstreet’s Card Tower was Wildly Incomplete by Emily Portillo

R&B taught me how to fall, howling, to the grass, how to bottle feed a white tiger

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In Retrospect, Blackstreet’s Card Tower was Wildly Incomplete

by Emily Portillo

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                 after the music videos for Blackstreet’s “Don’t Leave Me”, Sisqo’s 
                “Incomplete”, and Aaliyah's “Try Again”

In years spent cross-legged under the guiding light of MTV, Lisa Franking my notebook and coating my lips in pink lemonade Lip Smackers just so I could lick it off, the 90s, in all their wisdom and generosity, prepared me for two things: quicksand and heartbreak. I left them ready to sing, fist to chest, brows plucked and pinched, pocket full of polaroids. Ready to build my very own monument to longing. To haul myself up its sharp edges and teeter there until the corners of the frame darkened to vignette. Romance and the epic of its loss was mythology. The tower was made of women’s faces. Every tower was made of women’s faces, as though that was all we had to be wary of, but there are entire infinities that can, without preamble, take the center piece of me. Backyard canoe. Sidewalk sleeping bag. November bee bent at the false altar of my peony tattoo. Not once did my Discman get snagged on the way the body grows more translucent than a body should be and I, alone, crooned a high note in honor of the orange cat. R&B taught me how to fall, howling, to the grass, how to bottle feed a white tiger, how to defy gravity, to try again, again, again, but there were too many mansions and not enough mentions of the sexless wreckage of unannounced lasts: braiding the silken silver of my grandmother’s hair, holding my father’s hand and feeling small, or my son’s and feeling big enough to block the wind. And there is always wind. As for quicksand, it never looks the way it did back then and it turns out there’s no point in fighting it. You have to be willing to go under. It’s all love asks of you. The only thing your one life wants.

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Contributor’s Note

The day before I saw this prompt, I shared the Bubba Sparxxx music video for “Ugly” with my teenager and it hit me that his youth was nowhere near as impacted by music and music videos as mine was. It made me a little sad! I think music is often the first unfiltered education we get on romantic relationships and I wouldn’t change a thing about having spent so much time as a kid sitting by the radio with a cassette ready so I could pause and play to transcribe lyrics. Or watching with awe the passion and aliveness on the screen. Or stealing my sister’s Unleash the Dragon album, which I had no business playing on repeat as a preteen. R&B may not have been able to prepare me for every type of heartbreak (impossible!), but without it I wouldn’t have been so open to and unafraid of feeling and expression as a young person. I fell in love with the way the artists reached people and made them feel less alone. I wanted so badly to be able to do that when I grew up, but I can’t sing for shit.

That polaroid card tower has a permanent place in my mental picture of longing, but admittedly, not every tower was made of women’s faces. In the video for “Thong Song”, it was made of men on a beach. What an era. There’s most certainly a kind of heartbreak, too, in nostalgia

—Emily Portillo

Editor’s Note

We received almost 700 submissions for this month’s theme — Heartbreak — and Emily Portillo’s “In Retrospect, Blackstreet’s Card Tower was Wildly Incomplete” rose above the rest for how brilliantly it braids pop culture, girlhood, heartbreak, and the slow, bewildering work of growing up. I love how the poem builds its own shimmering mythology out of the 90s: Lisa Frank notebooks, Lip Smackers, Sisqó, Aaliyah, Blackstreet.

What Portillo does here is deceptively difficult. She uses the language of music videos — melodrama, choreography, gloss — to expose what they never prepared us for: the slow devastations, the untelevised losses, the “sexless wreckage of unannounced lasts.” Braiding your grandmother’s hair. Holding your father’s hand. Becoming a parent yourself. These moments arrive without a soundtrack, but the sorrow is operatic all the same.

I’m obsessed with how this poem refuses easy heartbreak. Instead, it holds up both sides of it: the glitter and the grief, the Discman bravado and the quicksand of adulthood. “There are entire infinities that can, without preamble, take the centerpiece of me.” Ah! It’s devastating in that casual, breath-stealing way the best poems manage effortlessly. And that ending — unforgettable!

— Karan Kapoor