This narrates from within Digestion’s language. It writes about itself. It takes place in a bed but also a body. It reflects the practice of collecting and transforming found materials in the format of narrative. Upon investigation of dream-state, the nouns of objects get transformed into verbs. Digestion remembers them as they happen.

The study investigates the use of words to describe more words. Data was collected upon psyche research, a practice of recording dreams. These recordings were filed and then reorganized/sliced/shifted to create a series of short stories which run into each other to expose the process of trying to remember a story that doesn’t make sense. The stories are told with the materials used in the artwork.

The study found that referencing a dream world is impossible and referencing artwork is also impossible.The lilies are blooming to their fullest.

My gut is liquid-y, spilling, and raw this morning. I finally slept after we severed our chord. I search in my phone and in rooms and cars and in streets. It’s all behind glass. None of it was mine.

In the morning and when clouds split sky, they make bountiful reflections across building-tree-land-store. I must start moving slower in this world. I am carrying a child of world worries and existential crises. I am psychologically pregnant with the weapons of knowledge and exposure of source. It is behind a wall of curtain and I worry I have slipped into a slippery slide of excuses and pain and fame. And I worry what if I am the one who is searching for starvation? Searching for emptiness? Perhaps I’m tired of carrying around furniture in my stomach. I’m tired of the kicks and the rumbles and the mice who live in my skin and sometimes they pop into the bloodstream and squirm with the digestion of pipes into room into loom into dome. Now I am severed from connection and I must nakedly dive into the ocean of framework and perspective. The flick of a lip the utter of a vocal chord.

The window is wobbling

A spidery landscape of branch silhouettes

Wanting to sprawl out and bite

The dusky blue shatters behind and through

I can hear my ears listening to nothing

Once there was a section of time

Who laughed in my face at my attempt to taste it like water

He wiggled into my periphery

And grew so large he was actually just my glasses all along—

I never knew quiet until

You unplugged from me—

Like a drain gulping

Leaving air to seize any warmth into a frozen tapestry of

Hair follicles and subtle gazes

I leaned into the wood so I could discover your anxious knowing—

Your undercurrent of dying instruments

Here we lean into the esophagus

Of a road and hope it tracks our speed

So the world can hate into an unbleached

Respite of freedom

Despondent and crucial — an inherent delivery service forward into cloud

Your ability to change the world: this experience is so undeniably rough and hard to believe— it is scary— you want some familiarity — you will probably run back into the arms of rage and respite— you will distinguish yourself with the narratives you have placed yourself inside— the belief that you deserve to be punished— that you are morally less and should be shielded from the world— you will see that you are inside an invented cage you must angrily try to get out but it is against you— but IT IS YOU. You have the key because you created it! You are autonomous and whole — you are unlikely safe without this identification. Getting close with someone is a normal part of distancing and clarification. I am losing sanity trying to isolate fragments of definition within a deliberate landscape— one of cherry blossoms and sufferings of tribal nations— one of mass production and severed gazes— it’s all out here—its all in tandem with slow ritual— a process who burns and carries softness within a new cup— I am whole and unified and subtly surrendered into a pitiless grass of goo and sadness— I hold the keys to bewilderment and rage and pregnancy and incest and birth and violence and fragments of you and me and all fun — we are all so whole and terrible and happy and joyously fucking— we are purpling all the time we are interconnected — we share stories and houses and damnations— we are livid inside a box of new reforms— we hear the rustle of leaves and call it an animal because it bears responsibility for sameness — we hate and we fuck and we forget love — we shapeshifter because we are human . We are ever evolving and warm and liquid and sometimes a concrete cinder block. We make massive bridges for the sake of knowing the other! We are unified into a frenzy of super hazy despondent and relentless aging— we wonder incessantly from relationship to relationship — we are so large and terrified . We lose temper in the bask of a giant night— a mouth slurping for its next victim— you in you— you and you— eating yourself into infinity— wishing terror into the serious gaze of your fictitious mother who lives in the upside down time realm of you dreaming bed— there is a landscape dark and abysmal it is your psyche. It is destructive— it loses shape so squarely and suddenly because it inhabits you like lenses — there is no separation between distance and defiant rage— it’s all interwoven from the language and mastery of superficiality . This is us in a timescale. This is us in a depth of gape— a knowing so large and effervescent it ripples across other beings so quickly00 so factiously — so loud.

I wake to a body filled with furniture—kicked, rattled, mice burrowing in the skin. The walls, thick with memory, breathe in and out. The pipes digest the night, and I slip between the rooms of my own making, searching behind glass for something I lost. Perhaps I was never meant to keep it.

The floorboards flex under the weight of indecision, my ribs creak like a staircase that has never been still. I am carrying something that is not quite mine—a child of world worries, an un-birthed understanding, an accumulation of knowing too much. Psychological pregnancy. The burden of exposure, the whisper behind the curtain, the ache of slipping through a doorway you cannot return from.

I walk the hallways slower now, as if time will take mercy. The dim light satisfies in a soft, electric way. At night, the dark wraps around my throat, and sleep runs from me. My muscles throb with the memory of what I have carried. A child in an overgrown dress. A house filled with objects of the past, rotting in the periphery. I am tired of shifting furniture in my stomach. Tired of my gut, torn and shredded, full of flanglins and critters. Worms that glow and writhe. Is it my duty to speak of the fire in my belly? The hunger, the rage, the insatiable longing?

I am looking for myself in the mirror of the world. In streets, in rooms, in cars, in the hollow echo of empty stairwells. I long for an in-between moment, for placid awareness, for softness without weight. But there is no distance between body and home. The rooms leak into each other, like my desires spilling beyond the edges of containment. Am I only a vessel for another’s comfort? A chair until I reveal my autonomy?

I dream of a man dusting my loft, dusting me. I dream of my glass breasts, laid out on the bed, fragile and shimmering. A bust of myself blocking the doorway, fractured by hands that do not know how to hold me. My body is a house, and the house is breaking. My period waited until we ended to flower out. A final bloom in the cycle of loss.

I wonder if lace has the ability to shield. If the softness can hold back the world’s sharp edges. I wonder if the walls will remember me when I am gone. If the ghosts of my hands on these surfaces will linger like fingerprints in dust.

The house wants to swallow me whole. The bed whispers of surrender, the floorboards long to merge with my skin. I think of disappearing into the wood, pressing my body into the grain until I am nothing but pattern, repeating endlessly. I think of becoming a ghost in my own home, drifting between walls, unseen, unneeded.

I want to be friends with myself again. I want to run into my own arms like it’s been years. To sit at my own table and sip tea, deep in conversation. To learn myself again, to be intrigued, to lean in close with the delight of rediscovery.

I am a shrine, a ritual place. My body is an altar of past selves, of incantations whispered through clenched teeth. I make offerings of words and sorrow, of blood and dust and restless nights.

I wake with the feeling of displacement clinging to my skin. The house sighs in the morning light. The window wobbles, a spidery landscape of branch silhouettes shifting against the dusky blue. I can hear my own ears listening to nothing. The air is thick with longing, and I wonder if I am the one searching for starvation. Searching for emptiness, for a space so hollow it might hold me without demand.

I am slipping in and out of belonging. I am severed from connection, sliced apart to make desire work. I am a tightrope walker, dizzy at the thought of the next step. Maybe I am ready to be a mess, to test the universe, to see if angels still exist. I want to shake off this skin, to speak to birds, to bury myself in dirt, to dissolve into the fabric of the world without resistance.

But the house calls me back. The walls lean in. The window holds its secrets. The bed waits. Tomorrow opens like a moonflower, bearing an ant inside. A gift. A sign.

I am woman. I am a house filled with ghosts. I am the window and the watcher, the door and the threshold. I am the structure and the unraveling. I am whole and empty, endless and fleeting.

OBGYN

On Thursday, I had my first gynecologist appointment as a New Yorker.

Somehow the room blurred out the midtown traffic sound. The windows funneled it into a distant memory. A soft hum rang from the stitches in the couches. The lighting was warm and low, bouncing a yellow-y ring of sunlight from couch to ceiling to floor. Their voices seemed to whisper through the threads from the carpet.

Putting my name and birthdate into a computer never felt so understood. The pens were melty and held my social security number neatly. As I winced in and out of focus attempting to decipher the coding on my insurance card, I heard my name filtered through a slew of jumbled up syllables. This room was another country to me.

A timescale of running and smoking seemed to dissipate through the walls. I was led into a hallway which leapt out in such creamsicle elegance. Her office was built for serious and attentive conversation, light wood, updated, and curved to form a table. Her hand was light, clean, and moisturized. It folded into mine as she announced her name into our eye contact.

Gravity tugged me down to the chair with persistence from the rigor in her stance. She saw me as a tangled up tapestry. She peered closer as my body searched for a breathing hole that was covered in sewing pins and misplaced thread. My hair reflected this in its matted braiding. She took off the tapestry suit I was wearing with needles piercing in haphazard directions and threads on the verge of choking.

I never knew I could take it off.
I never knew I was going to need someone else to finally take it off.

She stood back and lifted up the mess I had wrapped around me. I saw as a waxy film puddled on the floor, and threads popping out like severed veins looped in tired strands. The piece exhaled as she held it up, and immediately fell asleep. Heavy blanket cuttings folded into what looked like stomach rolls. Socks bursted at the seams, coughing as she dusted off the mold.

I choked at the trap I was huddled under for years. I sighed at the length I could now stretch my limbs. Centuries. Minutes. A pocket of mucus crawled up my throat and my intestines began to squirm and whine. Seeing my skin in front of me produced a nausea through my eye holes. It spilled out in moldy beads of crying. I was no longer at an appointment in between work and class. I tripped into a warping net of time that unraveled into a slowing. In soft breaths, I felt a purr from each individual in the practice. Their bodies knew which position to orient toward and I felt them around me like a weighted blanket. An animalistic quality was ignited in them as they registered my grief. Wailing droplets splashed and splattered into lakes of carpet pores.

This was not uncommon.