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
“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”
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
/ 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. 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?
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,
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”
--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
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.”
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.
