Woodside, CA (Feb 2020)
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Precipice (2021)
Be politely strange you tell yourself.
The lick over the knees and the fourth word.
Desire is best structured like an emptiness.
Objet petit a.
A tongue. A cat’s tongue. Soft liquid to meet a scratch surface.
Give it a life of its own.
The engine of burrow, nest.
The golden space of forget.
Hollow, A hollow, a halo, A hall, hallaway.
A lump of exhaustive condensation.
Parcels of pools, water beads on wooden small shapes last longer.
The walls. They aren’t pixelated.
You wanna keep the lights on so that your ocular input will extract information from this encounter.
You wanna hold your hand.
You want something soft to put over your shoulder to bring some warmth, weight, and texture to the air.
You wanna fall into these words.
The actual words. D, e, s, t, the letter bodies, with their solid shapes, slippery slides, notches, and bends to give you a real ride.
Rub your body along the sides and take a plunge to the middle spaces that have open or closed surfaces like O. U. R.
The textures may delight you.
Isn’t always the case.
Keep going. Keep going.
You’ll find just beyond these letters and through the words:
A river of clouds, high in the sky that morph into mountains as the perspective shifts, while creatures in the foreground silhouette walk on the edge of a drawn line.
The light passes through their bones, while a giant plant finger reaches across the whole of the landscape smudging you and everything a green green.
You yield into gravity as the scene accelerates twisting, bending, browns, reds, yellows, cream brown blue and a splash of pale pink.
The cowbell around your neck punctures the silence as you fall, and fall, eventually landing on a decaying log.
No one told you about the sounds you make, so this is a first.
The water you held in your mouth to keep yourself from going dry, is gone.
You are now beyond the precipice, the precious piss, the line between green and gray, the living and dead.
The dead rolls down into another kind of green. Vertical, old, in a repetition, not one mirroring another.
Hold
The dead, they make sounds high pitched, bright and long, sometimes falling silent when you come too close.
Desire is best structured like a lick over the knees and the fourth word.
Be politely strange.
* Precipice (2021) was shared in a evening with Fana Fraser of their written works April 16, 2021 (online) as well as a short film in Djerassi, Woodside, Ca
Photos: Effy Grey & Beth Graczyk
Photos: Effy Grey & Beth Graczyk