The day of her nineteenth birthday, she fell for a pair of hands holding a camera. These hands, such blistering control, such feathered grace, sliding a rough index finger along her jaw and pushing her head hard against the tree, exposing a collarbone. Opening a door.
To begin with, it’s exactly what we feared. And worse. Now, language doesn’t mean any more than puss leaking from a wound I keep reopening with a too long fingernail. Now, open means to fight.
if I heard what he was dearly saying, I would smother him in hot
wax to freeze the tongue
a reclamation of personal faith
Bleeding sounds like
provide and sustain. The delicate lapping of water. An animal’s tongue on cold steel. I learn how to listen for the first moment. To what turns an origin into a document. That smell of drying mud olive oil freezer burn.
I pull my own hair. Draw blood from the skin at your hips.
Sounds like
a poorly lit waiting room. Humidity. A fogged window releasing a heart with your name inside.
Between the wheels of a subway train and its tracks or off the crags of stones or even the space between your dog’s toes, between a curtain and its stage, or the air vibrating between two bodies, we may hope to find a world apart. Where time envelops space, shadowing it, scrambling it and then gluing it back together in a different scene, in quiet, anxiety-ridden hovels of pleasure lifted from pain.
We lay belly to belly, and he caresses the back of my neck with a sixth sense renewed, a fear of my body.
The damp air is slowing down. It makes him feel unclean. Salt grease stuck to his hair. He wonders: Have I done something wrong?
He prepped the ink and I caressed the virgin spot one last time. The first prick was a bee sting. The second was a cherry Life Saver bursting in my mouth.
When this moment passes, what will we most thankful for? How will we manage our resentments and our ironies; the failures we’ve inflicted upon others? What will the value be of one human, four humans, 55,780 humans? How will you value yourself?
“If you’re the kind of reader who relishes underlining favorite sentences and marking up the margins of your books, keep a pen handy while you read Loie Rawding’s debut novel, Tight Little Vocal Cords by KERNPUNKT Press. Laced with dreamy, surrealist imagery, Rawding’s novel is a hybrid of prose, poetry, and letters, inspired by the life and work of American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley.” (LCJ)
M was born from his mother’s house, her body stretched with and within a frame built by his father. Her walls of skin, tight and dry, stand hard in rooms of wainscoting. A puzzle bound together with old things. He emerged with a grotesque sound. Silence. A work of abstraction. A smudge against his mother’s breast. How easy it is to forget: grapevines can grow through cliffs.
She stopped at the grave of the writer, kicked off her sandals and scraped her toes against the rough granite, whipped smooth by the incessant weed wacker. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words. My skin prickled and I could barely help myself from reaching out and wrapping my wasted wisdom tight around her neck when I heard children running up the road behind us.