Nativity
Later I know you as a balance
of bodily functions: sleep, shit, the tethers
of milk and hormones.
Your fragility frightens me, the speed with which
a skull grows, fat and bone outpacing clothes, your fontanelle
and neck. I fall one night, while holding you, and sacrifice
myself. Over and over,
the news reminds me you are female.
Violence threatens legacy.
But when you are born, the umbilical cord wrapped
twice around your neck, in a “true knot”
at your ankle, you arrive with ease:
as strength, voice, will.
2018
§
Pantoume
This, a pulsional incident à la Barthes or
femininity. Meaning: an invite to iconoclasm.
Freud’s stink re pleasure/displeasure, cross-
outs or the pressure we have come to call dialectic.
Meaning: what’s femininity? Iconoclasm
as hard-backed covers on stamen, petal, pistil;
the sealed impulse of t[w/o]o
dried desire. Which is to wonder of self-effacement is it
akin to hard-backed covers on stamen, petal, pistil,
the mummification of this or that
s[us]tained desire? A past tense?
The brand of breasts?
The tacit pass of this or that prat,
always a slimmer foot-print, thine,
and yes, is it to do with the brand of breasts—
their pitched drawl, relational squabble? REPEAT
•
Years sterilise. Recall numbs. Mine recedes even now: the ghost of gravel dust in my nostrils dulls, how I crouched low, clung to metal, and fell prey to the frank absurdities of prayer. We are our close calls; man is the sum of his desires. That night safe-haven pulsed as each prior self, brave, exited—ragged, each hyperventilation of dead courage. Soft-handed comfort was too little, despised. Better, I recall thinking, to be struck, manhandled—made to show I’d survived. RETURN
•
Each wears the slimmer footprint,
conspires to breed that slice of one’s gut that thrives
for piqued drawls, relational squabbles,
for a French maid’s threads.
One recalls one’s thriving gut as
that first graphic novel, explicitly the page juxtaposing ‘boobs’
[O but for a French maid’s threads…]
with headlights. My First Porn.
Meaning: my first graphic novel glared BOOBS,
was no less than high-class, modern
as headlights. And my first porn,
a piece of art. No other gaze in si[gh]t-e.
So swank, modern—less,
if we jade ourselves, what now?
Trade difference for equality?
What now each flick of feathered hair? REPEAT
•
The conversion of humanity to image, icon, not via the proverbial gaze but via the categorisation of difference—difference so profoundly threatening for it characterises equality, yet also might let us the most supreme violence. The more we compartmentalize, the less we demand of ourselves that essential engagement with the human and rely instead on the frequent fallibility of base markers: race, gender, class, culture. And so following the teasing apart of one’s humanity by differentiation, a person undergoes that total surgical—if metaphorical—recreation of the self as victim: that ultimate Other isolated even from its own society. My makeover was a cruel distrust of all comments on my image, and the compulsion to change that image as often as possible to trip up even the eyes of those closest to me: e.g., a year of hair oscillating between blue, purple, black, white. Baggy, high-necked clothes belied my dread of exposure. Where do we site the unspeakable if not in ourselves? To what effect? RETURN
•
And had we jaded ourselves then, what then
of our favorite hose, disparity,
our hair, it’s £60.00 shade?
What a difference a wave makes. To who cares
for that express stocking that is sheer,
now a lady lynched for love,
her private turned exposé.
O there is something plastic to this emotion,
to this lady lynched for love.
And supple and invincible,
if there is something plastic to this emotion,
whatever you say, it stays
supple, invincible.
And our XX fits co-opted by principles;
whatever you say, they too stay.
But what of the declarations of want that throng REPEAT
•
Minutes, seconds—how would I share with you the chunk of an hour I spent pressed below the chain-link fence of a construction site, waiting to be found? How I believed those two men would track me down and, later the beat of their sprint haunted even familiar concrete. Afterwards is a sound that doesn’t subside, a pitch that sticks, resonant, to flesh. How the body can shrink and reshape itself via a blemished survival. Stalked breath, all sound a betrayal—to be, audibly, alive was to invite discovery. Do not find me, I begged; and of myself, do not beg. RETURN
•
each XX principle?
So radical we will
make these declarations
claim gender as contemporaneity.
And radical, we will
make can-don’t suit can-do,
claim gender as contemporaneity
each hyphenate self and Western pulse.
O to tick off solidarity!
In China, the mo communicates
the body’s hyphen as flow, not part.
Mais je suis desolée.
The mo, its movement, begins to intrude
on these uterine thoughts, their wandering
place. Je suis un filet?
Even Akhmatova’s lover slandered REPEAT
•
When the psyche revisits past selves it does not breathe easy. Too many hearts overlap our present, the body left but loose anchor, buffered by an accumulation of memory. A blank street is so much more immediate than this page for how it attends the stock fear of appearing—by angled shoulder, swung walk—too feminine. A target. The trajectory of an image shifts between knowing and not knowing. That night my calculated risk, my walk home, stole all. Each previous and potential self was packed away. I was quick and vehement with my lack of warning; to let any linger was to chance losing her absolutely, tip to toe. This: the still trauma lobbies, the web of gravel that laced my knees I knew would be an end—either way—to that perennial chase. I could not summon the habitual ferocity. And the only thing to do with the shock of striking home was to strip naked, to check and re-check my face in the bathroom mirror as each layer peeled away. As they drove beside me, as ten minutes later they parked the station wagon, took steps, they murmured: you are beautiful, from where? RETURN
•
her womanly hysterics.
So what of hair-colour, batted eyes, and the making-up?
Even Akhmatova’s lover, one poem claims,
slandered her kowtowed sins.
Dark hair and dark eyes the target of kohl.
But what of taking pleasure in gender tags, their provision?
What of our kowtowed sin?
If femininity pricks our need, what then?
I repeat: what of pleasure, its performance?
The twinge of tipping the projected.
If femininity so pricks our uber-need, what sin?
O for a fine dress plus slattern mouth,
the twinge of tipping the projected,
seamed stockings sans genetics, meaning
that fine dress plus slattern mouth,
plus Chanel No. 5 plus hairy pits. REPEAT
•
There were days in that city when I would not face its streets, previous experience of leers, catcalls, projected identities brute incentives to pull out, if only for 24 hours. Foreign women were defined by an influx of game students who frequented the clubs and, by proxy, the rest of us too were divorced from local femininity, marked for an extraordinarily rampant mitigation of social mores. Pale-skinned, blue-eyed, so tall I could rarely find trousers of the right length in shops, sans camouflage, I was effortlessly Other. RETURN
•
Or seamed stockings as genetics
meet stilettos and the biggest strap-on a gal can buy,
a spritz of Chanel No. 5 plus hairy pits.
Think Monroe in combat gear, in drag.
Or stilettos minus the biggest strap-on a gal can buy.
A straddler will always tap more beauty.
Like Marilyn, in her cunning drag.
Meaning: why not make the verso, back-stitched,
less ideology, more shift?
Garner new threads, part flora / part firearms.
Or honor the back-stitching with a raunchy
politesse, a nipple ring; O if only
our flora could double firearms maybe we
could at last cleave each stance into back and
—still prizing nipples, still prizing rings—
forth. At last mince. REPEAT
•
It’s the anxiety or skewed shame of voicing such events that contorts, the twist of having once appeared vulnerable, of how that vulnerability performs an enduring stigma. This is the complexity of re-claiming one’s appearance, of speaking the past in the present. That night broke my faith in language to communicate the self. Perverted by its economy, now older and hollowed, I know well I have been full of it. To my—vai via, andate in casa, mi lasci in pace—they replied with English. Even one’s own language can be refused if the need to differentiate a person is strong enough. For years now, I have attempted to shape this sensitivity into poem, approaching that ambiguous venue as a space allowing for leeway, but it will not—perhaps will never—match words. As semiotics have insinuated, linguistic signification can exemplify negative definition, each character made meaningful by those it is not. Prose only seems to perform most explicitly—by this I mean neutral—this void. RETURN
•
Or mince each stance into many:
paper doll wardrobes one day, the next a hospital gown,
regroup and mince again.
Drink promptly, perhaps of tequila,
in paper doll wardrobes now hospital gowns.
Smoke belligerent à la Frida,
drink again, so primly, of our tequila
and sing glory be, glory gander, glory goose.
O to smoke belligerent à la Frida,
to bid each apparition adieu and loose their bold skins to sound
glory gander cum glory goose cum glory gander cum…
The experiment as this space, alternately devoid
of apparitions, texture,
now pinched frantically into borders,
into a safe-house where
speech and vision coincide to REPEAT
•
The challenge becomes with what language can we convey such personal violence, with what words bear its experience, spawn a communal speech towards its eradication. This is neither to laud resorting to the bleak alienation of confession, nor to draw on the amputation of abstraction, but rather is a bid to somehow forestall the loss of what is daily and abrupt to the static endurance of an aesthetic. How to root acknowledgment, faculty, accountability and action, without hunting some twin pain in the Other—in the case of the text, the reader, that person whose heart and agency it works to engage. How to source empathy [not conflation] in light of the fact that we as general publics still do not know how to engage with our closed doors, behind which 1 in 3 women around the world are or will be affected by domestic violence in their lifetime. Among 16–43 year old women in Europe this violence is the leading cause of death, is not inclusive of those acts staged, civic, on our streets. Still we re-phrase, cloak ourselves in autonomy, back-roomed, capitulate to a corral of private expression that by default rebuffs its norm, our usual suffering. RETURN
•
rough up the possibles of marginalia, to coddle
the promise that is defiance or pleasure or
just the vital variation of old paradigms,
our Other made talked-about.
The necessary bid being resistance.
Meaning: how Ferrand Brandel writes,
records the residue of talk:
The question of boundaries is the first to be —
and further cites:
encountered; from it all others flow.
Meaning: The question of boundaries is the first to be.
Meaning: never let your little privacy,
for encountered; from it all others flow.
Each pulsional incident à la Barthes.
Each privacy and transaction. Meaning:
pleasured, dissed, pleasured, we come crossed. REPEAT
•
“Pantoume” was written in 2006 as a loose, hypertext annotation of collages by Marianne Morris. Images of the original work, including the collages, are available to view at http://www.orium.org/pantoume.