Tag: heartbreak

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, from Glass, Irony and God

Ana Mendieta, Anima (Alma/Soul), 1976, armature of bamboo and rope with fireworks, Oaxaca, Mexico, c-print on paper mounted on paperboard and printed, 1977

Sophie Calle, from Exquisite Pain

Sophie: 88 days ago, the man I love left me.
The scene wasplayed out on January 25, 1985, at two in the morning. I was in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi, he was in Paris. The split was done and dusted in three minutes, over the phone. An ordinary story. He had met another woman – a more docile one, I suppose. He would not be coming.

Unknown: I was twelve. It was in 1965. In May. At Arcachon. My mother and I were resting under a chestnut tree. It was midday. My father had left the house in the morning and we were waiting for him. Suddenly, he came out of the garage at the end of the garden, looking dazed and wild-eyed. He told us he had locked the door and tried to asphyxiate himself with exhaust. And he added, “Then I saw you, like the Virgin and Child, in a halo. And I decided not to kill myself.” There and then I jumped on my moped – I remember it was two-colored, orange and gray – and rode. Mad with pain that my dad was such a loser. Disgusted with the image that he gave of his suffering. I rode, straight ahead, for more than fifty kilometers. And then I came back.

He said he would be back and we’d drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don’t cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

Muriel Rukeyser, Waiting for Icarus (via grammatolatry)
Source: grammatolatry

                                          ADA LIMÓN

THE LAST MOVE

It was months when it felt like I had been
washing the dishes forever.

Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.
What is it to go to a We from an I?

Each time he left for an errand, the walls
would squeeze me in, I cried over the non-existent bathmat, wet floor of him,
how south we were, far away in the outskirts.

(All the new bugs.)

I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying
a zucchini like a child.

This is not New York and I am not important.

This was before we got the dog even, and before I really
trusted the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck
in the flesh of my neck.

Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there.
In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything
was clean and contained.

(Where I grieved my deaths.)

I took to my hands and knees. I was thinking about the novel
I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals
I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).

I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds,
judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree,
tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.

Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack
of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,
they found a woman’s body at the bottom
of the cistern.

Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting
to take a shower.

After that, when the water would act weird,
spurt or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me
just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,
at the lowest curve of the water tower.

Yes, and over and over,
I’d press her limbs down with a long pole
until she was still.

dupainetdesrolls:

tom-isaacs:

I’m Not Your Babe – Franko B

Franko B 🖤

“In a new provocative and stark portrait of the existential self, Franko B uses his own drawn blood as a symbol of carnal reality and suggests the natural destitution of the body as a fundamental of existence. Standing before us a mute body-object, achromatic and cadaverous, his performance is an act of cleansing, stripping the flesh of identity.”

—artist’s website

Source: tom-isaacs