b takes me up to the cabin and i am astonished. at the quiet and the close-to-obscenity of the mountains hurtling at an impossible angle towards the lake, the waterfall and its pools, more falling, more pools. we make fresh pasta and talk about romantic love and desire and how it is a place we choose to put our energy because it gives us a lot. we talk about the shame of this and how sleeping with or loving people you work with is, power wise, gendered away from our favour. we notice that it is so obvious and yet still hard to recognize that the feeling isn’t complicit with the action but rather the frame.
the transgression of public/private to post a selfie you took for someone to send to them. but these are often my favourite photos of myself. mid kettle boiling, mid outfit change, mid email send. it has to do with devotion, again. the transgression of public/private to write about selfies.
“The trees with their complicated limbs are still holding up the evening light as it turns red. The wooden frame of a half-built house. I wanted to say that hating yourself for hating yourself was femme, but anyone can do it.”
Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party
“Plants that are deemed invasive often come with names that point to other places: Scotch broom, Japanese knotweed, Persian hogweed, Himalayan blackberry. Their naming embroils them in nationalistic anxieties around borders and racialization that are really quite removed from the interests of plants.
Though such names paint them as encroaching foreigners, when it comes down to it, a plant’s status as a weed has nothing to do with where it is from, but rather whether it enriches or disrupts the things that are of value in a white, capitalist culture that assumes itself to be natural and native.
A plant becomes a weed when it threatens intensive farming and industrial agriculture practices.
Or, it becomes a weed when it disrupts notions of a pristine and unchanging wilderness, untouched and available for consumption/colonization.”
From Green Lines by Stacey Ho
i bite and watch my phone’s suggestion. a year ago today in Warszawa. the year unravels backward in a video: warm-lit kitchen holding what kitchens hold. three generations of survivors, plum brandy, laughter, a tomato travelled in a dishcloth from a southern town. the year unravels backward and i hold the shape of a family unmade. the year unravels backward and today i nail a trellis for grapevines to ache toward. today i hold things in my hand: severed blackberry root, my lover’s swollen forearm, the cat’s soft jaw, a book, a can of beer, a hammer.
R’s hands bear so clearly the mark of their work, their physical labour. sometimes their hands make me feel silly, superflous, abstract. the other morning in class I looked down at my feet: A had noticed a new callous on my right foot, and remarked that so much had happened since we’d seen each other last. the skin multiplying itself, betraying time and work.
lately, I get to say “see you at home” to B as we part ways at rehearsal, on the street, at a coffeeshop. this delight at a promise of return (in the morning, eggs, his music from the shower, evening, outside, a smoke before we part ways to bed) is fulfilling some kind of domestic fantasy i didn’t know i could have.
to return, queerly, newly, beginning again and again. “Orientations are about how we begin, how we proceed from here.” (Ahmed)
in rehearsal today, J mentions that she has recently googled the definitions of “precise” and “specific”. she’d noticed that people were using the words interchangeably: she felt they weren’t and wanted to check. specificity implies a context - specific to what? and precision implies a reflex: the thing that is precise is precise in relation to itself. i love this. i want to precise myself and all that i do. doing it makes it so.
why is it so much easier to make something when i imagine it as a gift, a devotion, to someone I love?
a + 7
Chapter 3
Antxro wakes as they always do, with a mouthful of light. Ready to spit. Antxro opens their mouth and sunlight pours through the space between their top and bottom teeth, the teeth 7lmend most likes to lick.
Quiet, it’s morning now. Everything quiet except the shriek of light leaving a mouth. When the sky is lit with the sound from Antxro’s mouth, the trees lit, the pinestraw underfoot lit, 7lmend lit, Antxro’s mouth belongs to itself again.
“Is this the place?” Antxro asks 7lmend. “Near enough” 7lmend says, and shakes off the pollen left by the demon of smallest sleeps. Antxro slept but feels the scrape of 7lmend’s sleepless night behind their left eye. Antxro wants to suck the feeling from 7lmend. Empty them out and fill them with soft mossrot and the edge of a river to soothe them. Antxro swallows and thinks of mysteries instead. “my love for you & that for me deep down in the Purple Plant the oldest dust”. “The difference between chaos and star I believe.”
Antxro and 7lmend continue on through the town towards the shape of a god not near enough to touch. There is rain but it doesn’t fall. It hangs suspended inches above the tops of everything. Hovering. Full of itself and a hundred thousand watery stories. Everything in the town takes on the shape of a god not near enough to touch. Corners, buildings, people, stones, shadows, flower stands, monuments all begin to soften and slip into the curve of themselves. It becomes hard to see. 7lmend whistles to feel the shape of the air coming back to them. The whistle bounces off the sloughs off the shatters off the shapes. It comes back around. Antxro and 7lmend find the narrow corridors of breath and move towards them.
Time moves through the breath of the town and everything else.
The town breathes and the rain falls. Antxro puts out their palm and is surprised by the coolness and wetness of time against their skin. They slip their hand into 7lmend’s pocket. 7lmend’s pocket changes shape to become a glove. Antxro’s heart changes shape to become a pocket. 7lmend slips their hand into Antxro’s heart. They find the pencil, and use it to write a corridor still narrow but wide enough to walk through. Antxro and 7lmend leave the town this way.
The rain stops. Slick. Metal. Quiver. Damp.
At the beach, feet in the water, Antxro asked 7lmend for the names of five things that are near enough to touch.
“ache, pencil, a cocoon like the sunlight, sorrowsong, rope” 7lmend said, and that’s when Antxro stopped waiting and began. Linden the lyrix had already begun but began again too. A lyrix is a hiccup in time, which is what makes them so beautiful.
the furrow above my left eyebrow that makes me look serious when I am in thought. the way each of my lovers for as long as i can remember has commented on it. to be considered a serious person in the eyes of others. to consider oneself a person who takes what they do seriously but not themselves. is there a difference? does it matter?
i meet with A, who is in town, for sushi and the server tries to seat us at a table in the middle of the restaurant. we have the same feeling but she speaks it, asking to sit instead at a nearby table tucked against the wall. we need containment. we eat black cod and talk about the corner that gets turned when one goes from working on a practice to making something. “i try really hard never to turn that corner,” she says.
i go away from the city to arrive at myself. i go for a walk without my phone, eat blackberries at the side of a road (steep hill) and think about abundance and horror. I sit by the beach until it’s time to swim: i think about grandmothers. no, i think about ancestors. diving in, i almost swallow a mouthful of water in my gasp at the change in temperature. in this moment i have two simultaneous thoughts: “she opens her big mouth and worlds appear” (Hannah Black) and, less a thought than a sensation: nostalgia for a future in which we talk about how we used to swim in the ocean.