No One and No Thing
kneading this
incanting this
soul-bright bloom
above the thorn.
No Thing
To see here
Tag: unknowns
Among Kings and Queens
Along the fortress walls
The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source.
It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life.
That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.
Mother, Tongue
First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
Facts of the Matter
At midnight.
Who was it below the owl,
what came to moon,
where its light
when I could not see
why this waves me?
And how?
Unkeeping
Embedded promise.
This is more than a box, more than any one thing at a time. More than the sharp line or the sum of coordinates of any of my known locations. This geometry is made of history, and it is personal.
Secret language of liquid belonging, live. Return me to the distance, remind me back to its original embrace.
***
Inspired by the art of Torkwase Dyson, borrowing phrases from her installations: Unkeeping (2016), Liquid Belonging (2022) and I Belong to the Distance (2016).
Reading in Space
Across time.
A question for the author: how do you want people to feel when they walk into this book? She answered by blackening a number of pages, then adding windows. If you stood before the words in the sunlight, they would curve across your body like cats.
The best part of the book, she answered, is what I don’t understand––also, the suspended moment when a page is turned; the wait between words, as especially what they do not say.
She invited the doubters among us to put our fingers in the wound between voice and image, and again between voice and word, between voice and speaker, the speaker and her intentions, and we were beginning to get a sense every page brought with it another wound.
Every page revealed itself by slicing us open, and we fell to the floor to collect ourselves like autumn leaves to our chests, a gesture of remembrance for all we had yet to imagine we were.
Between decay and emergence, these open windows. And from window to window, the broken skins between space and her time.
***
Inspired by the work of Lynn Xu, whose debut exhibit And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary art in Tuscon, Arizona.