first draft club
It takes me about a month to get my sea legs steady in a new year. January felt long but I try not to wish my life away. Now, it is February. I love the way we talk about time passing: this felt long and now we are here. Acknowledging time is maybe my first step in feeling less resentful towards it. Observing the passing of time like I’ll never get used to it. Days long, years short, I think is what they say? Even still, the days feel short, literally, given northern-country darkness, but also figuratively, days like train cars speeding by. I wonder if my relationship with time will ever find ease. I’m thinking about mirrors, hats, and spontaneity. Each thing, each person, a mirror to the work of the self. Hats as masks. Spontaneity as the opposite of choice but in a good way. Time spent with my inner child feels fruitful and also, I am attending to my inner elder! What does she look like? I think she wears blue mascara and wears dresses that show off her arms. I think she knows things I don’t and has forgotten things I know. I think she’s forgiven and has been forgiven. She is forgiving. I think she is Good. I love her! I can’t wait to meet her. Year of devotion. Year of revelation. Year of return. I drew The Moon for my tarot card of 2024 and so, yes, darkness and where the light lives is how I am approaching our year unfolding. None of this is cohesive which is a metaphor for the spiral I find myself seatbelted onto and riding amidst. VERISIMILITUDE
After The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp What I don’t remember is the throatal sensation but most else clarifies like butter fat. Alongside, ontop of the table, I, heap of human, without air, am open from finger- tip to mid-bicep. Ajar partially, still stringed to- gether by fiber, tendon, muscles rigor mortised. No one looks at me. The living cannot see the dead. Discard the skin to attend to the machine within, ignored advice, my skin still tact, taught, nearly translucent. Neck burned from rope, scabs not yet formed, blood coagulates even when life no longer lives in the body, input from this vessel not necessary to desquamate. Befriended gravity against my own wishes, alliance to science accidentally. Onlookers gasped before clapped, their hands: object against object, dualism’s loose grip. Witnessed apparition while I see only, briefly, face of the Preparator, like a nurse-God. Like dog’s tongue, the one I loved when I was small, unknowing, wealthy in ways I don’t remember.
You are breaking me into elemental parts: wristed arm open, palm wrong, oppositional, upward, backward, like I’m reaching to catch whatever’s next. You will examine the isolated parts: foot, stomach, eyes hardly closed. The last thing I tasted was my own salvia, like home, like being born: a tide, a prairie I won’t see. Handsoap laced with slivered wood. My body stops interacting with me, casual ending. Head: gone, I think. Heaven, reached with my? upward, backward palm. I touch heaven: flakey, textured, hardly fragile. Like a human body then.
|
