Sky blurs through the oculus while drawing up incense smoke until sun infuses posture with violets that once began in the mouth. I call this vitality “via” and sew it into my vest’s inner pocket along with baby teeth and rare earth metals. A stirring thrum in the left ear, in cheekbones, while alternative events shimmer in the background and the apps refresh. This jagged music will continue unless intentionally stoppered. I make my way south in a yellow nylon nightgown chosen from the free bin. This was before we lost the Palisades, before the sea heavied with your ash.
Just now, the prism you sent years ago is backgrounded not by the usual view of The Commodore Apartments, but with ice. Daughters quickly learn to flatten themselves before their mothers, your mother never introducing you to her friend, the Chilean ambassador, for instance, because never in her presence did you allow yourself to assume your natural posture, which is that of a god. Such withholding, often unconscious, renders the domestic polite and tragic. Such are gingham and kitten heels. Now, as ice melts, the window’s dazzle intensifies. Silence your phone for this jagged thought to repeat until it self-smooths.
Your husband has permanently departed—perhaps no longer living, perhaps no longer your husband; what else has happened in the background as the apps refresh? The oyster cracks open and is no longer the self-who-accumulates-before-the-mirror, although this diverges from last night’s dream character. Nevertheless, you make up your face like this entity and pin up your hair like she would have pinned up her hair and then act surprised to see her regarding you. I was looking back from inside your skull. I was taking your burlap dress and burning it in the hills with the apron and toy kitchen.
A stirring of sex, but sans-bee and sans-needle in contrast with a blade pressed into the plum. I awaken poppies in my hair and long to manifest not as a person but as a material, first raw and then spun into wire thread suturing the too-tender jaw. To intentionally inhabit the fractured I is to entertain the possibility that when I refer to myself as “you” I channel another’s sense, import this into who I am—also a you—proposing, even if just for a moment, that you reveal something true. Something of which I am ignorant regardless of ritual.
Unless we crush orchids. Unless we unglue the symbol from its fixture. Unless we bring ourselves to omission, purpose unthreaded, we’ll be burden and burden’s daughter: a hostess gift wrapped in silk spotted with gold stars. I was unable to accommodate their vision, I was unable to hoist myself to the proper level of speech which heavied my body not in the manner of a living woman falling with full intent to rise but in the manner of cement. I hope you don’t mind this intervention as dream mansions burn and no other elements accumulate according to sign and signature.
Debt overwhelms my system as oil fields ignite on the one hand and on the other, the pipes have frozen. To admit ephemerality is to position the tongue at the palate, open the jaw as wide as possible, and send up to the ceiling the eyes. This, while synching breath to crashing waves that began a hemisphere away. Meanwhile, you embroider Enfant de France roses along the slip’s hem because what undoes solace smells sharp, green, and punctures afternoon’s quiet which, in your opinion, is unforgivable, this being wedded, as we are, to money instead of the dark primordial abyss.
From this point of view, fishing lines catch in our gills before we begin, and every gesture harbors its own end. Nevertheless, I draw into the circle the dead god and the dissolved self until I become-flower and become-whale. In contrast, a permanent bond, there in the garden, pantomimed—this I regret. The methodology overtaxes sets of muscles until they nearly fail, not as weight training but as initiation to her choreography. With what else, then, will you dance? I’m not indifferent to the heroic body, but pulse and tide, thrust and yield command this “yes” rippling through dull air.
Under the window arid messages free the thunderstorm to draw on ocean’s warm surface until I adopt floral play and the faux fur vest presented as a costume to be selected after considering the consequence of appearing as this instead of that type. In the cutglass bottle, fish oil replaces Shalimar’s affair, serrated error, fruit tin flattened to a star. The ensuing style exposes fractures in the glass that’d been shaped like a goddess, breasts bare, arms above her head, palms to the sky as melody ghosts past the harbor and all that was, was a walk along the shore.
There’s too much money in my hair to evict with brisk brushing although against greed my baby teeth are stitched into ancestral symbols ornamenting my alter-ego’s favorite purse. She burns sandalwood for temporal thickening until the window fuses mirror and landscape into autochrome. What to eat and what to forsake. We long ago destroyed the nation’s spiritual centers, but this was after horses crossed the Bering Strait. A musical suture. A mixing of chromosomes. I identify and then I don’t. To decline via feminine charm expelling sleep until the shell’s interior directly communicates with orchids, unwitnessed, over-growing the bald cliff.
The narrative consumes several hours although its mineralized remains don’t fill a thimble. Nevertheless, something like “yes” still whistles around the room. I had been stalking the era with consciousness folded and fan-like, gestures stylized by beaded curtains, ice-blue. The AI reproduces three women with 1940s hairstyles and silhouettes; fitted at the waist and flaring out, identical except for the arrangement of rosettes. I grow nostalgic for Rudolf van Laban’s Monte Verità dance-farm and begin to rotate the body’s energy until the crown of my head whorls open to receive molten glass. I had never been so trim in satin.
Sap bleeds from the cypress as its deity drifts from one term to another until dashing away from disjunction carried out by the system itself. Craving her scent, I incline towards the rose even in the desert, even smuggled into cool pavilions and lounging bare breasted on a brocade couch. Rendered in loose brush strokes, the cultural moment requires a sovereign image and gold filigrees my skin while the horizon, strict, carries on regardless of the algorithm’s dictation. Harbored and shaken, darted and studded, I consume the heads of flowers, papery in my teeth and bitter at the tongue-suturing thorn.
This, murmured in response to blue satin, not its color—too pastel for veracity—but its sheen and weight, which rephrase the body’s registration of time. Henceforth, I was preoccupied with an abstract, private inquiry into the crystals growing at the corners of the eye, asking which pronoun affords most movement across temporal barriers as the voice tunes to green glass, to perfume samples held in the conservatory’s vault. When I say repose, I mean sandalwood. When I say faïence, I mean, essentially, patchouli and vetiver. Later, the stricken match makes a point. Later, the cigar and sun splinter glass.
The synthetic voice thanks me for my work but refuses to acknowledge data sets as biproducts of myrrh, harvested while wounding and re-wounding the tree to bleed the gum it secretes, penetrated. Not to put too fine a point on a blown glass statuette, but new designs are for flowerlike women’s rounded shoulders, full busts, and hand-span waists. Open with smoke and end with gardenia. Searching for task’s value I find repeated gestures of cream silk shantung sculpting my mother’s mother’s body into an hourglass. This, completed against a collateral, sway-backed, post-war, scent. Pre-populated application forms structure our future archives.
Where are the dear bottles of scent that you’re supposed to pass in front of before you address personal hunger? Thick blue satin sash. Where is the leopard on the stage? One can only, you say, stretch even elastic so far. Prior to suspension in the frozen waterfall, I mount the horse in my nightgown and unfurl until blood pulses my lower lip. Damask rose, blackcurrant bud, musk, and myrrh, the ten-day plan has us drinking gallons of lemon-infused water. As application, the “I am” unzips time into a form through which “I think” filigrees its cost across fractured narrative.
Worn about the head as a crown, later woven into halo, then abandoned, LED lights blink SOS until frequency jams, and the next sequence occurs in absolute dark. How do you know the physiological cause of hunger, how do you separate tension in the jaw from the mind? Time ticks on, as it does. I manufacture a rose-sprigged idea and stitch it over the heart, not as sentimental fact but to strengthen the garment’s shattered silk. There is no pleasure in culinary habits, so I long to become a garden fixture, a dreaming Eros, for instance, wings and genitalia intact.
The bathing dress with velour accents does little to anticipate the first bikini, which no one would model but an exotic dancer. To hum a little Verdi under your breath maintains mink cuffs and suspension sandals. For over a decade the Marshall Islands continued to be besieged by nuclear tests conducted by the US. Let us cut the background from the fall of pearls suspended between clenched teeth as you recline on a bearskin rug. Props include a rotary phone locked in the desk along with flawed dictation scrawled on monogramed paper. The unfurling fern charms me, not its spores.
