All month long, the gorgeous photography has been contributed by the talented artist, stephanie roberts. Her photographs were just as integral to this month’s theme and overall aesthetic as the work of the writers we were so privileged to read. stephanie’s photos have been inspiring me for quite some time and it was an honor to have her brilliant images set the tone for The Mind As Prison & Asylum. Thank you, stephanie!
Continue reading “Featured Photo Artist – stephanie roberts”
My mother said that I should bathe in oatmeal
So I do
thick baths gray with powder, sticking in clumps of snow
and I dip in so that I no longer itch
or bleed
fine body hairs twitch
preparing for something
past feel of foil clenched
between gnashed teeth
tungsten singed to hip socket
powered by whipsaws
the way hatred crawls from the strands
to the sole, in sync with the soft hum of
owls, empties me to a satisfaction.
it is dark here, and the night is competing
with my heart. whose version of darkness
is darker?
DNA smeared
over a broken
mirror
there was no
blood
Rhode Island, 1892
For Mercy Lena Brown
I.
After you die, Lena, you will freeze
until the neighbors unearth you
open your chest, your breasts
split to either side. In your heart:
blood–frozen. Your lungs, shaped like wings,
will yield once, collapse, and won’t rise.
When nights steal in I paint
a house filling with water.
I make the exit transparent,
front door gray and ghostly beneath
seawater creeping past the baseboards,
sloshing over the table,
after Marianne Boruch
My son lives there now, in his winter
like a husky dog burrows in snow.
Most of the rooms (yes, I can see them from Florida)
are muted by cold, and the furniture
is still the maple my mother bought the year
she had her affair with my father.
“Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent.” M.D.,Writing.
MD is mute. She throws her voice into the text and there, her voice, resides. There, in the book, we hear her screams, we hear her weeping. But alone, in her giant white mansion, she speaks to no one. She paces, endlessly, the only sound, the sound of flies and death emanating from within the cracked walls.
I know how to be a beetle stranded on its back,
a moth pinned flat inside a frame, a wildflower
pressed between the pages of a book, a petroglyph,
a fragment of my former self, a rock, a photograph.
It is never really about thinness. It is certainly not about fashion, or fitting in, or models. It is facile to call it perfectionism, because it is not striving for a perfect body. It is an act of erasure, but also of tactility and isolation. That is what I miss.
It isn’t the space
the closeness of knowing
somebody so well
we hear their heartbeat
inside ours,
or the aperture of life
squinting one morning at a time,
but I freeze right there,
She lies down in the snow,
kissing hoar frost pinpoints of silver light.
Slides into hibernation,
shedding faces as she sleeps.
Fusion, fused, frozen,
turn, turning, turned.
Off.
1. HE WHO IS NOW CALLED LAZARUS
was born a plain boy we
christened STUART
and thus it went
first his brain yellowed then grew
claws and we
were sore afraid
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 