DAY 19, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - CARRIE LORIG AND ELISABETH WORKMAN

from PROCESSIONAL/CONFESSIONAL

Carrie Lorig & Elisabeth Workman

from PROCESSIONAL/CONFESSIONAL

Carrie Lorig & Elisabeth Workman

(GFs/BODIES/ARCHIVES READING CHRIS KRAUS’S ALIENS & ANOREXIA)

“Many speak to the ‘personal relationship’ a collector has with [her] things. It would be better to characterize the community of genuine collectors as those who believe in chance, are worshippers of chance.” –Walter Benjamin

“Value, she decided, exists only in the joining of two previously separate things.” –Chris Kraus on Simone Weil

“Chance and magic, chance and claustrophobia.” –Chris Kraus

CORPSE FLOWERS

OH PROCESSION! PROCESSIONAL / CONFESSIONAL / PROFESSIONAL PROCESS IONS “Reframe your life like it’s a science lab and anything that happens will be art.” sciencelabALTARCOMMUNICATIONSALTERCOMMUNICATIONS Reframe your life like it’s an ALTARCOMMUNICATION / an ALTERCOMMUNICATION and anything that happens will be art.

Corpse Flowers

= the sound of flags

= a deepening of dampness

= what spills out of the cave / an oracle

= feather vats

= chest broken as a pearl bone  

= soft as fruit / salty as blood

= “So being, who lives in them, / who rots them out?”

= “The liquid tenants of paradise / aren’t coming back”

I’m bending / at all the cuts / limbs do / I’m bending at a growth / bending at an age / like the purple petals / skincloth sucked between CK’s dictionary / sculpture. An effortless purple / situation, spills out. In an interview I read this morning, Jackie Wang describes imagining / how time lapse footage of germaniums might look like the exploding unravel of fireworks. An effortless purple / situation, spilling out. Wang posts a link to a YouTube video of the real thing and says, “That is not quite what I imagined.” I don’t click it, I suppose, to elongate the imagining, or more precisely, the passing on of the imagining / All That a Book is / or Could Be. At the springs stuck with mammoth bones / peril bones, a teenage boy tarred at my breasts. I mean stared. Starred. I’m tempted to make it a question. Because did he? Later on, we’re at a bar in St. Marks, reading. There’s a storm that never comes / that flashes on the edges. Drunk women in golf carts / gold hurts. The waitresses get out of their lace cars. They yell to each other / from across the parking lot / call each other gorgeous. I don’t go running today / It’s the only day / I don’t. I wear black and brown together. Are geraniums ever purple? Are they ever pulses? I imagine it is so.

=soft lapis in the mystery virgin

=dust on the label more label than label

=palpitations in the imaginarium

THIGH PAPER

Long thigh / Think thigh / Is that the wish of my fish body / butterflied / ugly heart nothing but there / to bubble its black soup impossibly over? I think about bursting skyward / clots and / clouds and / clots of brute affections / Rutting musk / A sky geranium / To stain vs to disappear / A diasporic both / “[T]o see a landscape as it is when I’m not there” [Simone Weil] / To stray / in formless promiscuity / What is the skull? / I want it to be a holed stone / weather happens through.

But it is such a sticky hole. Do you write in fish pose, too? I trace the outline of my body and think crime scene mermaid on a rock / silent Joan of Arc daring a knife with her neck / Marie Antoinette’s last dream / Clarice Lispector at the Copacabana thinking GOD FLOTILLA. This wasn’t what I wrote / whispered in the hole / that was something irretrievable about a hot body sacrifice I haven’t exactly captured here.  I dedicate this practice to Simone Weil, Chris Kraus’s mashed potatoes, & masochists everywhere.

CORPSE FLOWERS

=ALL THAT A BOOK IS WHEN I AM NOT

=lupines at the site of repulsion

=Chris Kraus on the Artist’s Co-Op “Processions” of the 70s: “Subliminal cross-referencing, dense jungle clusterfuck of objects. Is there any better picture of utopia?”

THIGH PAPER

Thek thighs / do they gap / do they wishbone? \Thek thighs for free? / CK writes that Paul Thek “visited the Capuchin catacombs near Palermo and was amazed to see 8,000 corpses--‘not skeletons, corpses’--lining the walls. He’d picked up what he thought to be a piece of paper. It was a human thigh.” Later, CK tries to embody Thek, imagine what it must feel like to be in Thek’s body older, naked, checking himself in the mirror. “Not to admire yourself but to check to see what you look like,” I remember my father describing my relationship with mirrors. To check because I didn’t know or to check because I was always changing. Observation or prescription? I think my secret wish for these uncertain encounters was transfiguration.  “It delighted me,” said Thek, “that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.”

CORPSE FLOWERS

= “ghost theater: they are blatant, manifest, and veiled”

THIGH PAPER

“To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself . . . From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” [John Berger]

“I dwell in air, I take up air, I hold possession of my air / Am an accuracy but whose, or rather what’s?” [Alice Notley]

Thigh paper stretches / taut / taught in the purple creases of a vexed phenomenon.

This is a hungry archive SUPERCLEFT.

Its jewels.

Its surveyors.

Its flesholds blooming exits.

TURNING STERNTEEN

Pages of a childhood:

….BABYFAT….BOYGIRL(AWK)....BRIEFGIRL(CASE)....STERNTEEN….ALIEN….(I LOST MY VIRGINITY TO MY LIFE AS A) DOG....SLUT….MOST LIKELY CULT MATERIAL[1]

“I KNEW YOU WEREN’T FROM HERE, YOUR EYES ARE TOO BIG.”

“YOU WERE BORN OVER EIGHTEEN.”

        ….XTREMELY PALE PROM QUEEN / FORM STEAM….INTELLIGENT SHORTCUT / INTELLIGENT PIXIECUT / BANGS / PICTURE DAY FROWWWWN BURN

“BACK IN THE PINK ROOM OF CHILDHOOD MASTURBATION”

“YOUR FACE IS A NARRATIVE.”

“WAIT.”

CORPSE FLOWERS

=unseen corsage secretions

=ecstasy of hags and piggies

LOVE & BULLIES

First cut. An early body bursts in slow excruciating deviations / something on the brink of beast. Tantrum of a lag-effect / imminent tuft. How do you figure gravity in the time of poison oaths / how does anyone understand stance? / Second position is one foot at home / one foot away. / Eve Sedgwick tells her therapist: “What you completely do not seem to catch on to about these two parts of the kid is that they are not separate. They are constantly whirlpooling around in each other--and the basic rule is this: that each one has the power to poison the other one.” / First is never feeling very home. / “A big girl” / you mean tall you mean fig plucked from regular programming in which this little piggy went to remedial gym class to learn how to skip. / The cafeteria’s a cynical florescence-- / one kid drinks grape juice and yoohoos together then laughs so hard he pukes puce from his nostrils / Crystal says the chicken nuggets have testacles when you bite into them / slaughter from the meat-packing plant with the slogan “Home of the Smiling Porker[2]” drifts its iron perfumes through springtime slackjaw windows / --thick with the clamor of nascent hierarchy / humidity of the already overcooked and non-consent. / Certainties / even these attempts at grammar / like brute administrators foreclosing mystery / always somehow looking on / bullies poised with the ball in dodgeball / in bold type in textbooks /on the property line I wasn’t supposed to cross / in the corners of the tv screen / on a balcony in my head peering down eyes squinted / watching for vulnerabilities from the back of the bus. / I’m sitting above the wheel / I’m spinning till I’m vile / I’m gorging on pale flowers and vomiting bilehood into my puffy winter pigcoat / I’m locking Charity in the coop and getting cut getting caught I’m scabs always but I’m safe when I’m reading, I’m no longer me.

ALIEN FAITH

Less than an expression of remedial narcissism anorexia might have been “a single moment of true sadness connect[ing] you instantly to all the suffering in the world.” UGH UGH UGH THIS IS THE MOST DIFFICULT THING TO WRITE ABOUT EVERRR / I KNOW / I was even thinking about the earlier thing you wrote about mirrors / how I still have no idea what I’m looking when I look into them / how I can’t even think about them as anything / but distorted territory / indecipherable territory / a place where I truly don’t trust myself. / YES I STILL DON’T KNOW /  & it isn’t narcissism like the literature says / it makes me so sick to think that’s what it says / & it made me so sick to put that fucking John Berger quote up there / but it also felt prescriptive in the manner of my father? / Nods, and maybe what’s difficult about admitting anorexia / speaking admittance / of anorexia / is that what is misconstrued as narcissism or a hyperawareness of watching is a.... / i am thinking “an urgent desire to exceed that economy” paradoxically--i think it was about becoming borderless / YES borderless in understanding and enacting control even / which sounds horrible / but is just something that is SO DENIED to the young girl. YES & nobody (among the slated surveyors) is saying the circumstances / worlds we are born into are inherently sick / order of the disorder. / I am also remembering what you said about the way girls are treated in schools and how desperately I felt / at the time I was most immersed in starvation tactics / when I was most submerged /  I felt I had to exhibit I was / a special student / a worthy intellectual. YES[3] / and for me I think it was an unflinching insistence--in which my body was the material--on a language / form NOT MY OWN (as my difference in the tyranny of suburbia / high school and acceptance into a floating world) /

LOVE & BULLIES

ALIEN FAITH

And this is the thing isn’t it? That no one understands how ACTIVE girls are and how ACTIVE they desire to be? I would have done anything / to know and understand my power / and I did / and I was lost to it / my difficult, fucked up, real interpretation of what that meant / and I thought I deserved it.

LOVE & BULLIES

“At noon our bare knees hit the pavement without flinching. Friendship was an exquisitely inflexible choreography of confession and betrayal. Books were weapons,” Lisa Robertson writes in “Pure Surface.” First pomegranate / later grenade. Quiver and crouch beneath this shell I’ve found. I’m fond of fingering the wound till I can fit through it. Suspension in amniotic violence[4]. A womb in preferring not to and wanting from reading all of the else in the world, an insatiable want for something else--that reading is a fetal position, a sky burial in alien pulses, an introversion that is a relic social, perverse, more than personal, and I transpose this want with all of my body.

TURNING STERNTEEN

Second Cut. I was wearing a maxi dress / a purple more purple / plume flooding / a brutal kind of dousing / also known as pattern / a pattern of small flowers and teal. We / my friend and I / exchange letters / sometimes infused with these MAKESHIFT HEADSHOTS (body as floral arrangement) / for fun and for mirrors and for checking in and for a kind of tender knowing of each other / which is both impossible and real because / we’ve never met outside of the Internet. It’s not that different than CK and her S&M pen pal, Gavin, (It’s difficult not to hate that nickname, Africa, (tho I suppose he embodies it in some way--movie producer flows to Africa thinking he’s just making movies and $$$$ / HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN OR WHAT’S FUCKED is what I want to say to the dying trees / to what stoops down low and near to me) that she gives him) in that sometimes you want voices or pixels or bodies floraled or smoke / smokingclots to be the only thing that touches you / to be the only thing that makes your vulnerability unleash / to be the only thing that FEEDS you. Of the latest picture, my friend said, YOU HAVE A STERNNESS / YOU LOOK MUCH CHANGED-- SEVERE? STRICT? THE HARBINGER? When awkwardness turns to power or is power or transforms its magnitude further (WHAT IS HARDNESS? ALL I CAN ASK IS STUPID / IMPORTANT QUESTIONS), is that STERNNESS[5]? An intensity / A force / A vector / An oversensitivity / An insistence. I feel an uttering inside me / that I want to call an opposite of pop stardom / a difficult rhinestone branching out / in that my girlishness is rarely noticed, in that my girlishness is rarely directly surfaced / or allowed through whatever plethora of / stale veils. Rather, my girlishness is a wilderness / an experimental glasswork. It is not totally parallel, but I think of Gertrude Stein saying, “How can you distress me. You can’t. You can please me.”GS has always struck me as girlish / all nononsense-all nonsense play in her responses / to a befuddled audience. Her obsession with the decoration / the core laying all over the house / in ribbons. GS has always struck me as girlish  / all nononsense-all nonsense play / in the joylight of her always highly conversational friendships / of her surrounding paintings / of her serious arrangement in sentences. Isn’t it girlish? Isn’t she so close to what she resisted? Girlishness is sustaining / play / is sustaining / your own particular refusal / that dripping dress. Girlishness is sustaining / an otherwise fullness / an otherwise saturation. I think absolutely. GS is what sustains the impact Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase. I remember one of my students looking at that painting / that female body in motion / while we talked about Tender Buttons and asking, Is she laughing? My girlishness / my vision of the girl is sternness w/ petals. Can’t it be? Can’t it be a jeweled rind soft and some juice / stilled / on it? Why else can’t I stop writing about fucking flowers / godlilies? “Hi, my name is stabcake bloomrot. What’s yours?” I said to fizzing callspace / crawlspace  inside me. I was a serious child or a serious adult with an irregular period. I am a vivid incubation / of dreams / of blood and milk in a dying quarry / I am a vivid incubation of ribbon and the harshest ability to survive.

IMPROVISED RITES IN LIEU OF THEIR DELAY

Pain that is not re-injury / make it required reading / secrets of the inside state park / A RARE JURY FOR IMPROVISED RITES. The task is to strip down / you will be dancing for _______ / and in the blank llamas appear / because they are like femme ghost warriors / or excessive lamas / because they can do the physiognomy of heavy-lidded ennui and this is the funeral parade for a more-than-personal puberty. It involves standing facing the wrong way[6], shoulders like shrunken skulls trying to talk to each other, head slightly severed asphodel, plume of bloodgossip, solemn teetering in the parodic life. It involves standing on all fours to portray ANCIENT WRUNG  and blow from the seven orifices QUAVERING OPALESCENT EGGS that drift towards symmetry (though never achieving it) to form their own melancholic galaxies. It involves spreading like hot oil into loopholes in the grid, in the girl, fizzle and throb on the asphyxiative edge. Falling as you are falling sleep. A flinch across years. It involves picking the body up by your gapped teeth and peril-diving from the precipice for exclusions, for their imminence. It involves opening the body like an umbrella-blade, dissipating till secret, rattling for everything dead that must know about this feeling. It means rupturing through one skin and emerging glabrous, raw, and the illicit glamour of eating the evidence only to tear through another skin. “Like chance, emotion is a current that dissolves the boundaries of a person’s subjectivity. It is a country. Shouldn’t it be possible to leave the body? Is it wrong to even try?” [CK] Changeling! Limpet! Masochist! Vespertine! Pizza Delivery Girl! It involves live burial. Llama spit.

A THEK IN THE WOODS

That sweating snippet / that drip feast / the pigskin frost / that blubber chandelier: “This morning I got up and I barely / knew where I was, I walked / around naked for awhile , checking / out my indentity in the long mirror in the front room & I / was disappointed in what I saw,” from Thek’s diary that CK includes reminds me so much of James Schulyer’s “The Morning of the Poem.” “Force, fate, will, and you being you: a / painter, you drink / Your Ovaline and climb to the city roof, “to / find a view,” and / I being whoever I am get out of bed holding / my cock and go to piss” Summoning in Aliens and Anorexia is almost always unexpected and potent. I love that. It’s a fabric of presence. An insistence. Toothsome and wet, Paul Thek is failure @ Whole Foods. Thek in his grocer’s apron [What job(s) will I get to supplement my small adjunct income? My mother suggests catering / landscaping. I am too old for this. I want to do what I am. The reality of hybridity is anxiety. The reality is that I wish we could be alive differently. Write novels made of caves and flowerbark in motels. A poet I know is in love with Frank Stanford and cut fish at the fish counter during his MFA. Fishman. Fishglam. In our lair, we joke about selling the cat on Ebay for extra cash and labeling her as, “A Small Football Team.”]. Thek in his sater suit. Thek thinking about the word mausoleum and bright pink pyramids in the Fall. Thek unable to give up on thinking his art is worth reception and attention / that it deserves it. Or rather, simply, that he deserves to work. Isn’t this where I get stuck? Where we get stuck? Joe Brainard begging on the streets in Boston. This year’s poet laureate taking his job and $$ and saying, I would prefer not to,  when asked what . Workaholic / Trying hard to write this book / Anorexic / Type A personality What this does to your body how it marks it / pock marks it Song of Desire disappears into you and destroys u

Schulyer / was another man who was ashamed / who was [more] bawdy and cruel and tragic [“to see things as they are too fierce”] / repulsive eating habits I hear / left glasses of milk around the apartment / didn’t want to work or refused to work / grew fat and secretive and v. ill.

/ addressed each letter to Ashbery differently / Dear Carolyn Court / Dear Hosty with the Mosty / Dear Regency Rake /

I love “The Morning of the Poem” even tho I don’t read much Schulyer really. It’s has those guts from Thek’s diary / bawdy and cruel and tragic / and reminding me that no amount of abjectness / saves you or prepares you for being truly disgusted with yourself. Yesterday at the laundromat, we ducked out for Mexican food, came back, and I suddenly felt I couldn’t face my body at all / too gross / too swollen in my dress / my lopsided balloon hair / like my body was glasses of milk left around the apartment lumpy and rotten and reflecting onto the back of the industrial dryer. I was there thinking / Seriously, fuck this idea that poetry makes us children again / Doesn’t it makes us a body again? Couldn’t it? What was in the letter? “Got too close to the lawn and now there is so much living there / in my tangled wrapped Head.” “Art” really is “artifact,” says CK / “A person’s whole experience and life.” OCD Vivian Meier / Bernadette Mayer dreaming of losing the box of everything. / Someone told me they were amazed at how quickly and constantly everything around me worked itself into my poem / became my poem. Sometimes I think it is disgusting

AWKWORLD ACTIVATION

Ballet was an intervention in my terminal awkward state. My parents, a school-teacher and bartender, (my mom the only college graduate between the two), could barely afford it, which I guess speaks to the urgency of the intervention. Boyish and clumsy, I was put into ballet, the passive voice an artifact from the economy of passive aggression. No one, not even me, could have anticipated with what volition I would grow into its sealed grammar. A grotesque turning-out & turning away from any personal sentimentality. Even here it is difficult to turn in / it feels crippling / and I don’t know how to do it / how to see it and want to / tenderly and murderously / after all these years / I am now awkward / with good posture.

I don’t remember for how long I didn’t get my period. I want to say two years, but is it possible to ever become pregnant after a body sits on death’s lap for so long? Wouldn’t the body want to eat its caviar first? Do the eggs return with banners? “COME BACK! ALL IS FORGIVEN”? Do I say it? Was I ever really sorry? Are we golden in our screams? Freaks?

SWOLLEN PERFUME

Introversion as a paradoxical unfurling, wandering way out and vaulted beyond the claustrophobic cul de sacs of the I. Thinking about “the animal is instant” / “the plant is also animal” / Mary/Feng Sun Chen writes “I’m so inside that I’m outside.” In Aliens & Anorexia I re-read the Simone/Aldous matrix: “Like Simone Weil, Huxley was impatient with the boundaries of him- ‘self’ and longed to attain a state of decreation. ‘This suffocating interior of a dimestore shop,’ he says, ‘was my own personal self.’” Getting lost’s a way to grow antennae / receiver hunger for something else. But deeply incongruous with expectations of the social/psychic girl body who always must know her place. “[Huxley] is a distinguished and credentialed thinker, and so we take him at his word. Yet why do Weil’s interpreters look for hidden clues when she argues, similarly, for a state of decreation?” If it was a woman who had said the only philosophical question is suicide, how would we have diagnosed her in order to excuse her thinking?

CORPSE FLOWERS

= THE SECRET WILL OF MY BODY IS ITS OWN CATASTROPHE

SWOLLEN PERFUME

1) I was telling a friend I was struggling with writing about postponed adolescence (“postponed” because I am more adolescent now),  and she said she was just writing about teen Marx, how even in adolescence he must have had to face what-about-you-already-tried-it-and-it-didn’t-work.  Her poem says “knowing this is literally |all there is| on repeat // fort-da, fort-da, fort- // (because why otherwise?)”

2)  In which adolescence goes missing a girlishness is like the lost body part, its irregular pearl flickering in the sticky afterbirth. Then gone. The meanwhile altitude is remote--no man’s land, trimmed in the clipped breath of a self-induced distance, cataract contracting a cannibal gown,  empire waisted with oneiric mouths. “In phase two, the body starts to eat itself.” [CK]

3) The woman who cuts my hair, who always swivels the chair with mercy away from the mirror, says, “I’m going to make it severe so it looks intentional.” I asked her to cut my hair like hers, closely shorn on one side of the face, with everything else long and erratic, asymmetrical, which she reveals is the fluke of her hair growing back after she lost it after giving birth. “It was so thin at one point it was translucent,” she said, “disgusting.” We decide to call the cut THE AFTERBIRTH. And maybe everything is? The trees leafy afterbirth. The memorials inorganic afterbirth. This dress with its pattern of fans a billowing afterbirth. Patriarchy--psychotic, dissociative afterbirth. Anorexia--alien afterbirth, the end of the line. In phase three of anorexia in women, menstruation ceases. Chris Kraus says that “most psychoanalytic literature” suggests that “starving girls stop menstruating because they’re scared of ‘femininity,’” that they intentionally SHUT-THE-HOLE-THING-DOWN.

4) In this I am 4evrawk-- “do you remember the squiggly underscore and  the squ“awk”s in the margins?” “do you remember how your hair fell out?” “do you sneak food” “how your skin grew an orange halo” “how often do you weigh yourself” “how angel food was okay because it was mostly air” “the stretched feeling of cells contracting?” “of anxiety?” “the illusion is: it’s a memory it’s a childhood[7]” --UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATOR OF THE AWKWARD.

5) I have to look up “fort-da” and find Freud / the phrase from an anecdote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle / literally “gone” then “there” /  a little-boy-subject’s game of disappearances and retrieval.  Because in the absence of a biological/chronological/normal adolescence I regress, feeling the convulsive plain. Fort-da smashstrokes. Fort-da blubberstars.  Fort da ligatures through inelegant intensities

6) with u. That this is a difference, “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” [Maurice Blanchot] A difference:

7) the king is dead/long live the king. Long live his hungry daughters rhymes with martyrs. Long live the corpse flowers pitched in the night lockers, the sylph lakes feeling all Diet Coke, hoarfrost[8] creeping inside the suicidal swans on their lunch breaks. And long lived the aristocratic fetish, his eye pinned to cleavage, ideology, literature, aural gardens underwritten by enclosures and a juvenile colonialism--it seems almost ridiculous ballet still exists--what was the first want? its pre-grammar? an errant desire for weightlessness co-opted by the guilt of power?

8) Of course I am asking these questions in my own abandonment of the art-form, my failure within it I sometimes explain as a sudden boredom with trying to sustain it. Of course I hate it now like a fascist and YouTube it like it’s porn.

9)  I consult Bernadette’s letters, decide/divine on “The Vanity of Mount Hunger,” and it should come as no surprise that there I find the llamas. GOD/ANIMAL OF THE AWKWORLD. “A llama for us or above us, is life really too simple or free, is it a sin to see a llama.”

THEK’S LOST ARCHIVE

1) “I have whales in my hands and an American flag in my mouth.”

2) In the small museum downtown In the free box they have an exhibit on / an old way of graves / gently tented just above water graves gently tented just above water = sticks in the rivers in the pools and the dead or dying bodies gently placed just underneath the water the waterearth with shells beads pieces of leather boney bursts garlands.

3) What is it to dissolve, Fishman? What is it to FEEL SUSPENDED? To have your arms extended or open like a garden and a notch? (I keep thinking of the man I saw when I was running / of the men I often see when I’m running. How he opened up his arms and blocked me on the sidewalk and said, You know you want to run at me.) Our hives are full of various colors of pollen right indicators of different flowers bees visit. Our jackets or our horror stories or our tea of black and green. What is it to design disruptive concealment, Fishman? (A swimsuit / a swumsuit / a spacesuit / a covering of fish.)

4)There’s a spongefisherman exhibit, too, in the small museum downtown in the free box. There’s heavy equipment and long, long tubes w/ the roundroundmouth of oranges and the oiled scent of commemorative vacation plates and bikinipostcards and immersion instruments and everyone hauling their bodies to the bottom of the springs / the clear and cold swamp. One of the crews found the remains of a mammoth / a thigh bone of a mammoth. Hardened sponges littered the exhibit.

5)You ever lie down in the shower? I do. I want to lie down in the shower with a sponge under my hair or between my hands. I want to lie down in the shower with a gentle tent of sticks above me. You must make your death public, says Chris Kraus quoting Ulrike Meinhof. You are an alien suspended over the museum / in the water, says Paul Thek.

6)Last week we went to the springs where the spongefisherman used to work and saw a turtle swimming under us there, a thunderstorm I wanted to remember everything about. I saw a man poured gasoline on the BBQ over and over in the rain and the fire licked it. I saw the turtle come out on land and buried her eggs and the crows

7) What is it that Lorca compares Petrified Octopus to? Agave, that’s right. A kind of honey for our backs. In the desert, sponges are always swept and wet, sugared and soaking up the impossible. I’ve been writing about the spongefisherman for so long (the spongefisherman, a gift from B), the figure who dives down, who cuts the water, the wave in search of what is absorbing the ocean. In the ocean, sponges are a kind of eye soaking up the clarity / the clearness. It never occurred to me, as I was using the word that the spongefisherman, was real.  The spongefisherman. I didn’t put two and two together until after the exhibit, until I was looking at Thek’s hanging man [How does your tarot define the Hanging Man?*] / his Fishman / his wiggle bodied flood man. I just knew what the word felt like for me / how it occurred to me / how I am always hungry.

*THE HANGED WOMAN angel/trickster, tree jewelry, hovercraft/hoverlaugh, light radar “To the outside world, a person with sacred values may seem upside down, backwards, the wrong way around. His or her behavior and concerns are different than those of society…..// Surrender is not solemn or grim.”

---

[1] Jessica went on to dance with Twyla Tharp / Stephanie became a Rockette / Alice long e-sounded her i, added a stress to her second syllable and joined Martha Graham / Emily’s still dancing somewhere in Germany / Jamie injured her back and became a flight attendant / I died and went to poetry

[2] “It’s Pig,” says Kim Hyesoon, “Pig who has never seen the outside, always Pig, depressed Pig, Pig who cries wolf, Pig who has chosen the most terrified pig in the world to be the king, Pig who shouts Oh, fantastic sewer! while hugging its pillow…”

[3] (just yesterday at the post office I heard myself in a delinquent enactment apologizing to the postmaster for disappointing him / not buying expedited shipping insurance receipt acknowledgment army escort for a parcel / & then moving on to my next item, he was like, it’s okay, yr postcard passed the test / it gets an A)

[4] I squirm in the composed grandeur of sentences like “The suburb is a child’s Versailles” and feel a strange guilt in not relating. There are no rotting rabbits here, no pus, no cheap feels or tacky lights or photos of Erin’s crotch when she fell off her bike and was unconscious long enough for that to happen. I’m looking for the sisters home alone binging on Fun Dip on the parental bed and underneath it the naked women of gender hyperbole on ratty glossy covers face down in the short shag rug. What were you doing in our bed? Shrug. The suburbs make porn possible.

[5] A man catcalled me in a Thunderbird (RU KIDDING ME WITH THAT RED PAINJOB) / (Since I first wrote this / more / two men who could’ve been my students catcalled me / in the hallway outside my classroom) / at the traffic light. I was there resting / I was preparing (AREN’T ALL THESE INCIDENTS / THESE DYING PLANTS THE SAME INCIDENT / THE SAME PUBLIC WOUNDING?). It’s so up there, temperature wise, at any point in Florida / in the jungleheat day / and  you can’t really run with a shirt on. I want to feel like I can / sometimes / like sometimes I can strip down out of NECESSITY / and run by the world in only my sour sportsbra + shorts / not thinking of anyone or my body in space / only thinking of my movement my work my pounding. I was lying on K’s floor / we were talking about how important it is that we exercise / that we have something to regulate our sensitive easily overloaded / always overloaded systems. Does that make sense? IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT LOOKING GOOD OR PRESENTING MYSELF AS SOMEONE WHO KNOWS SHE HAS TO “TAKE CARE OF HERSELF” / IT’S NOT ABT U / TAKING CARE OF MYSELF HAS SO LITTLE  TO DO WITH  U* / OR I’M LEARNING HOW IT’S NOT ONLY ABT BEING MY BODY IN PUBLIC / BEING AGAINST A TWITCHING / PUBLIC EYE. When the voice from the tinted windows / the dark of the car / the Thunderbird came out / at the traffic light / at the stoplight / I just fucking lost it. WHAT MAKES MY ANGER SWIFT? / While walking up to Josh’s apartment in NYC, we noticed a BLADE ON THE STAIRS. I looked at thoughtfully / I yelled at the thunderbird / WHILE WAVING MY MIDRIFF AND MY MIDDLE FINGERS, / “I am stern, motherfucker. Drive the FUCK on.

*All caps / The hysterical revolt / The deranged crop top

[6] IF IT FACES FORWARDS, IT’S NOT IT. -Madeline Gins

[7] from Erin Trapp’s “a thing fit,” discussed in “1)”

[8] Oh god, it just occurred to me that _FROZEN_ be read as an allegory--albeit whitewashed and airbrushed and Disney--of anorexia?  Elsa, who doesn’t understand her powers/is told to hide them/can’t touch people isolates herself in her own palace of ice (there’s no food there). Etc.



Carrie Lorig is the author of NODS. (Magic Helicopter Press), Labor Day (Forklift, OH) with Nick Sturm, and stonepoems (Solar Luxuriance Press) with Sara Woods. Her first full length book, The Pulp Vs. The Throne will be out in 2015. For the time being, she lives in Tallahassee, FL with the poet Nick Sturm, near where the manatees winter.

Elisabeth Workman is the author of seven chapbooks, including Opolis (Dusie), ANY RIP A THRESHOLD (Shirt Pocket Press), and with Michael Sikkema TERRORISM IS WHAT WHALE (Grey Book Press). Her first full-length collection Ultramegaprairieland was released by Bloof Books in 2014. She lives in Minneapolis with designer/typographer Erik Brandt, their daughter, and winter.