by Maddy Costa
– after Jenny Hval
1. The silences between things This city grinds its cogs until their teeth crack, chews through dentists, doctors too, the very notion of care fragments, spat out with brick dust, cement dust, splinters of MDF, wire skeletons warp in demolition plots that once were bomb sites, it’s all the same violence, just a different day and it startles you, how loud the grief, how clear its name: after all, what else has it ever been? Sirens chase another disaster, sky heavy with grit, punctured by cranes, overcast by office blocks whose turn will come to fall, it’s all the same cruelty, only today you woke in the brace position, reached with ragged breath for solace to the chorus of women who know, who sing your broken heart is visible from the outside who sing you’ve got to get through this life somehow who sing we mostly grow by dying and you lift your voice to theirs, the spell-weavers stumble on the high notes, rise again with bloody knees drag the melody down, deep enough to mend 2. Tangled in your hair The edges of the words curl round each other: epistemology, ontology, teleology, and because you are diligent your eyes clutch the dictionary, widen at the chasm between sentence and sense. Curse the Greeks all you like: this is the language that finds you. Entangles you. The spell – call it praxis? or poetics? encounter in thought ideas in company attention as resistance knowing where and what to reject 3. Dancing is futile How night saw you afraid to cross your arms over your chest in case a demon sprite should mistake you for someone already dead. How impermanence made you afraid to live. How fear held you immobile. now you dance on the kitchen floor partner with a slant of moon swim in chemical sunlight each length a dream of sea walk each day, tease the dog none of it distracts for long but still you dance dance a spell with words, with flour, with compost-earth and seeds dance with pencils, dance with chalk into failure, out of loss dance despite the futile shift of seasons, turn of tides partner with a slant of grace through the breathless end
Written in company with Spells, by Jenny Hval. The first part also quotes from The Dreamer is Everyone in Her Dreams, also by Hval; I Opened a Bar, by Sophie Hunger; and Miami, by Caroline Rose
Maddy Costa is a co-host of Something Other.
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