mercurialmist

[mercurialmist]

Writing & Poetry Share, 18 March 2021

Everything Forever

[mercurialmist]

[mercurialmist]

keɪ.ɒs/ kaʊ, Anita Marante

Cows, chaos, a general feeling of abandonment. Say “cows” when you want  to say “chaos”. Speechless. Do not know how to express it, this bubbling  cows inside keeps getting entangled. Scream cows when you mean chaos.  when you mean chaos, there will be cows. A diction problem. Repeat after  me: cows cows cows. Chaos chaos chaos. The more people the more to  explain. The same does not happen with cows. Or chaos.  

I can barely understand what a cow is, how am I supposed to replace it with  chaos, the word where everything could fit. How can everything fit in a word,  including the mouth that projects it? How can you translate cows to chaos  and keep the meaning of the sentence?  

I have been looking for you to deliver a message, if you are ever able to try to  translate it. Sometimes you just have to switch it, stretch it, make an effort,  look beyond your poor cow-optic eyes asking for answers in your stomach.  Transmute into another being. Language is a tool, but not that is not enough.  This will persist when cows and chaos merge, and when someone believes  they never merged them. I think I could spend the rest of my life talking to  cows if I learnt the language. And that only means that if I looked into their  ridiculous eyes, they would understand mine.

See more of Anita’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/anita-marante

[mercurialmist]

Elena Lo Presti, Kitchen-bed, 2021

My kitchen has been my bedroom. I would sleep on the floor listening to the soft buzzing of the fridge for the entire night, and in the morning I only had to stretch my arm to open it and pour myself a glass of milk. That was my ecosystem, I used to store my body the same way I would put away a frying pan in the cupboard, folding my legs and my arms until they would interlock perfectly.

I used to cook food for you there every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes they would all be the same dish because I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed so I would cook from there (usually a bowl of rice and fermented soybeans, sometimes with egg, sometimes with fermented cabbage). I would confuse my bed and my kitchen a lot; I guess when they are so close it can’t really be helped. I was also alone for most of the time, and no one ever told me it was wrong. So my dreams started merging with my food. When I closed my eyes, people had the shape of bread and butter, cakes, pizza pies; sometimes of long, transparent noodles. I told you about my dreams one morning over the phone; you said: “Wait fifteen minutes, and please get dressed”. The cab you sent for me arrived as I was shaving my armpits, bent on the sink. The driver didn’t look at me for the whole journey, he brought me to Yau Ma Tei and left me in front of a skyscraper, where you are waiting for me wearing a blue dress that fits tightly over your body and hips, and grazes the pavement when you walk. You brought me to your favourite hot pot joint, on the eleventh floor of the building, and you ordered all the meat on the menu: you ate vivaciously, your mouth moved faster as you chewed. You were so beautiful, you were breath-taking.

I left my kitchen-bed and I started to eat out all the time. When you were with me, you would wait for a big pot of boiling tea to arrive, and you would wash every single plate and glass with it before we started eating. After your cleaning ritual, everything was warm: it was your way of blessing the table and the dinner. My fridge was always empty, and the kitchen stopped interfering with my dreams, which now were just regular, perfectly normal dreams. What really excites me, is that I am using different cutlery and dishes and glasses every day, every time I look around, I am somewhere new, and my ecosystem has expanded into a large, city-shaped house.

It’s too hot these days. I wake up at 5AM opening my eyes very slowly, my hair is sticking to the back of my neck: before I can focus on distinguishing the shapes around me, you call my cell phone and you tell me: “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I made onion curry. Do you want to eat it with me?”

When my eyes adjust to the darkness, I am in my kitchen-bed again. You have put a cardboard box on the floor, with a plate of curry and soe iced tea. It’s getting lighter and lighter, like the day sped up as I ate with you. You started crying, and the food became tasteless as I kissed your tears off your cheeks, and the sun started setting.

At sundown, looking at the laundry hanging from my window, I felt like the whole world was coming onto me, pressing hard on the top of my head like a crown made of pitch-black darkness and the occasional star. I fold my body again, like I would fold a napkin on the table. When I wake up, I stretch my arm to reach for milk.

See more of Elena’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/elena-lo-presti

[mercurialmist]

Alessandro Moroni, Solaria, 2021

See more of Alessandro’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/alessandro-moroni

[mercurialmist]

Recurred Recollection, Luis Tapia, 2021

The world is still asleep, or yet the witness hasn’t woken, how could it exist, if we weren’t there to have noticed? 

We gather our sense of selves upon waking every morning, like gathering the ingredients to feed our family once they wake. We roll up our tobacco in the cutting morning frost, exhaling in the doorway, half a self and half a ghost. 

We devise these meagre rituals to help us understand. We do not yet remember the peculiarities of existence: the bitterness of the coffee, the creaking of the chair, the reflection in the mirror.  We must have woken up too soon and left our minds in a dream. Devoid of articulation, we reconstruct its language by a window. Here we rewrite the story of the first mind to become aware of itse

See more of Luis’ work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/luis-tapia

[mercurialmist]

Kevin Siwoff, A male in his stereotype a person unable to cope with his own femininity, 2021

See more of Kevin’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/kevin-siwoff

[mercurialmist]

Kathryn Attrill, Feed the reel, it’s hungry, 2021

Feed the reel, it’s hungry.

The hunt begins.

Head to the nearest green area and look around. 

Vigorous roots stretch urgently, invasive attempts to touch every inch of soil. 

Let them touch and permeate the earth of the film instead. 

They can eat that glossy surface whole and regurgitate foggy images. 

They prefer the damp so look near slow flowing water. 

Hear the water lap against the soil. 

Imagine droplets drifting to their impatient mouths.

Glide your fingertips along their hairy green skin. 

WATCH OUT FOR NETTLES

Handy another day though, remember where those spiky onlookers are. 

Handle the furrowed flesh gently, snap the stems with care and leave the roots. 

Take only what’s needed despite the apparent abundance.

Bees are hungry too.

They like the purple toothed flower and their fuzzy bodies are too small to be greedy. 

Bring your catch home and stew them whole.

Let the steamy aroma seep into the space, fog up windows, let the cool breeze into your lungs. 

Don’t rush this, make the solution strong.

Let the temperature drop to a tepid bath and swirl in soapy crystals and powdered vitamins. 

No need for light, flood in the darkness and immerse the film in its herbal bath. 

Bodies entangle in mending and soothing; forms hurtle around in the shadows shaping and being shaped. 

Hazy images emerge, both forms lacking and gaining, fixing and being fixed.

See more of Kathryn’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/kathryn-attrill

[mercurialmist]

Effy Harle, Father’s Head Verse 1, 2020-21

See more of Effy’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/effy-harle

[mercurialmist]

Meghan Murphy, Orts, 2021

See more of Meghan’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/meghan-murphy

[mercurialmist]

Bea Grant, I AM FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE WHOLE WASH OF TIME, 2021

See more of Bea’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/bea-grant

[mercurialmist]

Orts, Meghan Murphy, 2021

When coral and poppy lipsticks melt into waxy pools they are scraped away. Yet the empty tubes remain, rimmed with colorful remnants of time. 

The residue of laughing painted lips cling to hollow silver shells. The stifled air, moist with trapped memories, turns acidic, tarnishing the silver bullets in blues and greens. The weaker metals succumb to corrosion and the smooth geometric objects of the vanity descend into the mirrored surface…an infinite reflected universe of pock-marked moons and rust-cratered pits. Glass perfume bottles, whose contents have long-since evaporated, reveal droplets of gooey condensation on the inside. 

Every time I turn on a faucet the water splutters in mud brown streams before finally fading to a pale yellow trickle. 

Inside this house there is no letting go. 

We can’t even replace the carpets, until the carpets speak for themselves—abruptly unraveling to trip us up. Failing plumbing stains the walls in murky teardrops, rivulets cascading down, down into the earth—and the same shade of paint is used to cover up the blooming mold. The wallpaper-ed rooms are less lucky—if the wallpaper is no longer in production then it stays, doomed to gradually be absorbed by the sweating house. A bathroom with walls of vibrantly colored, life-sized birds has faded from ornate detail to abstract shapes. The yellow finch that used to watch me with a discerning eye, has been reduced to the silhouette for a toddler’s puzzle. 

The house gasps, groans, wheezes and secretes …

There are birds of all materials here. Porcelain eagles, taxidermy ducks and pheasants, delicate glass swans, a bronze peacock figurine…..

On the wall of the den is the mounted head of an indeterminant creature. Its mouth is open to reveal pointed white teeth and I see my brother and I reflected in the protruding marble eyes.

“It’s a fox,” I say.

 “No,” my brother responds resolutely. “It’s an opossum.” 

The toy box, an excavation site where the heavy wooden blocks of my mother’s childhood lay at the bottom and my own plastic toys float towards the top, all webbed together by the roots of tangled doll hair. We prefer to play with the bronzes—a collection of dog-sized statues line a room, an infinite circular migration. We climb on to ungiving saddles, little hands grasping cold buffalo horns and clutching at the faces of stoic Mohican chiefs. 

I am all too aware of the constant surveillance that follows my padded footsteps. The walls are covered in heavy oil paintings, depicting dramatic scenes of nature—a ship caught in the throes of an angry sea, horses (so many herds of horses) in various landscapes—galloping, grazing, leaping into the air with rolling white eyes—and two large portraits of them, stationed in the heart of the house. 

The grand piano sits below their looming faces—a glossy sacrificial altar. The ebony surface is covered in a clutter of picture frames, the many factions of a tangled family tree. The newest faces and unions vie for the front, dangerously close to the edge, while past, ended marriages and children long grown linger in the back.…. It’s the photos that don’t make it in the frames that matter—those candid moments that break through the glossy sheen.  

I enter rooms on tip-toe, and hold my breath, always waiting for…what? To see the statues scramble back into place? The portraits conversing? I can’t even find peace in the bathroom, where a framed, larger-than-life nude woman bathes in the moonlight, glancing accusatorially over her shoulder at me. 

And when it all becomes unbearable, all that empty, heavy space, all the unblinking eyes, I defy the house the only way a child can. I open the home stereo system, installed under the old record player, and press play on the album ‘Now That’s What I Call Music. 9.’ There is something immensely satisfying about filling the space with the pulsating base of Missy Elliot and dancing spastically around the house. Pausing in front of china cabinets and display cases to flail my limbs wildly. I am both defying the on-looking artefacts and also moving, running, prancing, and crawling for them. I scream the obscene lyrics, and when I don’t know the words I fill the void with howls, yelps and guttural cries. 

In the summer, we collect dozens of inky black tadpoles from the pond and bring them inside to observe their evolution into frogs. With transfixed satisfaction we watch the wiggling amphibians absorb their tails and gills, to sprout webbed feet, gradually preferring the floating branches to the depths of the tank. 

By the time the frogs are leaping and croaking, their startling ruckus is too erratic and I can feel the house expelling their presence. When I release the frogs, I think of the mounted fox, collecting dust in his perpetual snarl, glass stags frozen in flight, the bronze boar in everlasting terror and the hounds always tensed to lunge. 

We have granted these things a power and their stillness now vibrates with a tension that will surely crack if the white porcelain arms of ballerinas, extended high over heads, don’t finally rest. 

Every closet and drawer is filled with them. Racks of dresses hang in a shocking burst of color that even years of mothballs can’t subdue. Stacked boxes of white leather gloves, waiting to either mold itself to my skin in a permanent grasp or disintegrate from the shock of warm, pulsating flesh. His imposing army of suits, the outgrown shells of a larger-than-life man. 

Over the years, we grow bolder and shift through her dresses, fingering the stiff fabrics and choosing our favorites. 

“Try them on girls,” they whisper. 

We are all silent as the rigid materials swallow our pre-pubescent bodies, but there is no warm encasing or folding of fabric over our slight frames. The dresses stubbornly maintain their womanly shapes, and we are just sticks propping up the figure of her. 

It’s when we start to move that the ritual commences. There is something intimate and precious, and thrilling, because we know it is wrong to be wearing her clothes. In these gowns we feel elegant and graceful and hold our heads high as we twirl and pirouette through the house like a coronation—a sense of importance and birth-right. 

We baptize the stiff dresses in our sweat and the dusty-dry fabric greedily soaks in youthful beads of perspiration…a secretion of inheritance. 

…10 years later

“Now that I’ve left, when I come back to the house I feel like that boy, Holden, from Catcher in the Rye,” he says with a half-smile. His posture is rigid though, and I find my brother’s resigned behavior maddening, as if we hadn’t spent our childhood living here. Hands stuffed in his coat, he winds through the room, giving the furnishings a wide berth.  

“Remember,” he continues, “how Holden loved the Natural History Museum as a child and suddenly he can’t bear going back because he’s changed and everything remains the same inside the museum?”

I only vaguely remember something about a red (or was it orange?) hat and a carousal. His eyes finally land on the oversized portraits of our great-grandparents, dominating the living room, and his expression sets.  

“Meg,” he is resolute but I can sense a dread in his voice that alarms me.

“I love you and I want to set you free.” He emphasizes “free” as if it means so much more than I understand. 

“Sometimes the power of a place, an artefact, or a story, can help guide us into our own. But this has gotten way out of hand. We,” he gestures around the room to indicate our family, “we were once the weavers of our truth. But, suddenly our hands couldn’t keep up with the loom, or it was like the loom didn’t need us anymore…and now we’re tangled, trapped, suffocating in our own creation, while the story shuttles on. I hope that you are able to let it all go…leave this tangled mess where it lies. Perhaps pause to wonder at the knots, frayed ends, and faded dyes…at this jumbled creature that has enveloped you, and what it once was. I want you to feel the blood start to circulate back into limbs that you haven’t even realized are numb, wrapped up in this vice-like thread. When all this is over, maybe take a strand or two with you to carry around as a reminder.”

In the back of my mind I can hear my cousins’ comments about how lost my brother is. How ungrateful he is to turn his back on all that our family has worked so hard to achieve, and how our spoiled upbringing is the only explanation for his dissatisfaction. 

“I don’t understand…”

He surges on:

“You know how Grandpa taught me how to fish? And how I was so excited that I nearly hooked myself in the eye?” I smile fondly as he touches his brow, where a small scar disrupts the arc of hair.

“That never happened. I got this scar from hitting my head on the coffee table. I don’t even like fishing. And I barely remember them!” 

He gestures accusatorily at the serene, smiling faces on the wall. 

I am horrified. 

I was born shortly after my great-grandparents had died, and grew up envying and reveling in everyone else’s memories of them.  

“I started to catch on that everybody in our family had these special moments with them, and that there was never any kind of timeline or specific setting. And everyone is always trying to up each other with how meaningful their memories are. Aunt Susan got herself into trouble when she went a bit too far with her sailing story, involving that storm and shipwreck, forgetting that Grandpa never learned to swim.” 

He picks up a porcelain horse from the mantle-piece and snaps a leg off. For a moment I swear I hear the terribly crisp ‘crack!’ of breaking glass, resounding through the house. Instead, there is only my own sharp gasp and a dull splintering sound. 

“This isn’t hand-made, limited edition porcelain from Vienna. It’s acrylic. Probably from China. Maybe there was an original figurine once-upon-a-time, and maybe Grandma really did smuggle it back from Europe in her jacket, but this particular one is the third acrylic replica—in our lifetime—to be placed here.”

He looks at me pleadingly, “surely you must have caught-on that something was up…”

I look around the room; was there an imperceptible dulling of color and light? Had there always been so much…stuff? Every surface is covered with the treasured belongings of my great-grandparents. I finger the scratchy wool of pillows she crocheted. Here was his rifle collection, above a desk littered with her stationary and a heavy glass paper weight. And suddenly I feel those binding ties that he had been talking about. Every object, painting, and photograph that has been eternalized in my memory over the years, is connected to me by hundreds of threads tied to my ribcage. As I stare at the tremoring silky strands, I wonder whether I spun this web or if the objects themselves cast the net. And now I can never unsee or un-feel myself caught, suspended, propped-up in this thing. I realize that these are ties only I can sever. But what if these little connections are what hold me upright? I picture myself a crumpled heap on the floor, with no more wonder and certainty to buoy me back up. 

“Hurry!” My brother says, an edge of desperation in his voice, “before it is too late.”

I frantically begin to pull…and pull and pull and the fibrous strings just keep coming….slipping, wet and glistening, through my skin… and then with a panic I press on my stomach and, instead of my bottom ribs, all I feel is soft, vulnerable intestines. I am unraveling myself. I am this thread, and I was moments away from unmaking myself.

Suddenly, my brother’s face transforms. As I watch, it continues to mutate between gender and age, and yet there is something familiar looking back at me. In skin that is soft, taut, and lined—all at once—I glimpse iterations of the same eye-shape, and pointed chin. And I am not afraid. “You have passed the test. And so, you have earned these—The Scissors of Acceptance, and The Stone of Truth.” They pass me a pair of small silver scissors and a whetstone, that sits reassuringly in the palm of my hand. 

“But ask yourself: why was it so easy for my little tale and demonstration to nearly unspool you?” 

When does the silence of family secrets, glaring omissions and mysterious gaps, accumulate to become more substantial than what is known? Perhaps the unspoken and unacknowledged is the backbone of the narrative. Perhaps one doesn’t necessarily contradict, or negate, the other. 

I can not pull, or exorcise this thing from my body; I must accept it for what it is and be grateful that it supported my trembling legs until I could stand on my own. I use The Scissors of Acceptance, sharpened by The Stone of Truth, to cut the strings. Each snip of the scissors is a snapped chord—a violent jerk, quivering, and finally stillness. 

I leave the house. And these ‘orts’—leftover fragments of the past—trail behind me in a soft silver wake. As I continue moving, the ghostly little strings begin to tentatively seek each other, connect like grasping hands, and eventually these remaining ties are the beginning of something new, and whole. A sheening garment, light as air, covers me like a second skin—as comforting as a blanket and protective as armor. 

See more of Meghan’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/meghan-murphy

[mercurialmist]

Yukako Tanaka, Naughtiness

See more of Yukako’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/yukako-tanaka

[mercurialmist]

Ása K Jónsdóttir, Quiet, 2021, 114x125cm

See more of  Ása’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/asa-karen-jonsdottir

[mercurialmist]

Georgina Watson, Revisiting Moment in Landscape no.1, 2021

For this past week something about the first photograph has been troubling me. 

In looking at it I’ve become attuned to it,

In my looking I’ve seen less of myself and more of my sister. 

So I asked my Mother, 

Revealing that in fact it was my sister who sat upon my Dad’s back that day. 

She wore a facial expression typical of me but as we look at it together her head shape seems more and more like her own,

So we revisit the album once more.

Finding the key clue, 

Another photograph of my sister in the same jumper.

Alongside it, a photograph of my Mother and I from the same day. I am sat on her back just like my sister is sat on my Dad’s. 

We stand in front of a river, a place I instantly remember. 

For even though I live so far from this place, 

I revisited in 2017.

Seeing this second photograph, the one of my Mother and I, changes deeply how I see the image of my Dad and sister. 

Changes I cannot undo.

The previously mystery image is solved. 

Whereas before it was without this category

Now this has been restored. 

There, clear and seemingly obvious. 

Why didn’t I see it before? 

My instincts told me, I had not visited this place a second time

But now I know that to be false. 

My relationship with this image, place and landscape has changed. 

I applied a structure, 

One that is based on knowing.

I think back to the first position I initially took, 

I miss that place, 

That place of thought. 

I was enjoying the mystery, the unknowing, the freedom and flow that the photograph had.

Now lost in the structure I gave it. 

No longer lost in my thoughts around this photograph, 

Instead I am blocked by the knowledge I gained. 

It is a task finished, 

A mystery solved. 

I wish this were not so.

I have restricted myself, 

An unknowing, which unearthed elements about my relationship to that place, has since gone, 

It vanished before my eyes. 

I miss this unknowing; 

It is not present in the photograph I now know to be me. 

I know too much 

about that photograph too.

Frustrated,

Lost,

I do not know what to do next.

So back in the photograph album they both go. 

On another day I’ll come back to them, 

Revisit them, perhaps after some distance, 

Once again, I’ll be able to ask myself about

What I did not and do not know.

See more of Georgina’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/georgina-watson

[mercurialmist]

Georgina Watson, Moment in Landscape no.1, 2021

I do not remember this photograph being taken, yet I am in it. Sitting in a chair strapped to my Dad’s back I look just over a year old.

It must be the first photograph I have of myself in a place that is not my home. Well home as in the house that I sleep in – maybe this is the first photograph of me in my home. In what I now call my home – the rural landscape. My Dad stands in the middle wearing his Asics trainers, Always Asics, I’ve never known him wear anything else. This pair is just one of the many that I’ve seen him wear since this photograph. The track he, or should I say we, stand on is narrow, dusty and coloured like hay, but among the green verges, what stands out to me is the willow herb on the right side. As I believe this is likely to be the first day walk my parents took my sister and I on, I am now looking at it, observing the landscape with the knowledge that I have since been taught. But I can’t help but think about and question what the younger me with her confused face as she is strapped to her Dad’s back and told by her Mother to look at the camera thought, and how did I think of the landscape then? And how did this moment play a role in what I think about the landscape we are in now? The willow herb and the bridge in the background tell me it is likely we were walking along a disused railway. But did I know it then? Did this information frame my interaction with that place then as it does now? For me, looking at this photograph from 1998 is both odd and familiar, the track I assume is somewhere near Cambridge as we had recently moved there but it could in fact be anywhere. I have since been to many places that look similar to the photograph’s setting, but I don’t think any were actually this place.

I have so many questions,

Ones that for now I do not seek to answer.

Instead,

I continue to look with wonder.

See more of Georgina’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/georgina-watson

[mercurialmist]

Effy Harle, Father’s Head, 2020-21

See more of Effy’s work at: https://www.everythingforever.net/effy-harle