Five minutes ago (again)
I often understand what my work is really about only months after it is complete, and I've been staring at it, and the thing I can't escape, I write, and so learn: this painting is about slippage.
Five minutes ago (again)
I laid out this line
And tended it well
And walked its boundaries
And mended a crack
And nodded at my tidy work.
Five minutes ago (again)
I opened my eyes
And stood in my power
And made friends with my fear
And told myself I was enough
And guarded the gates of agency.
Five minutes ago (again)
My heels were there
My head was here
The blood was everywhere
The books were muzzled
The wombs were tied
And I was surprised this five-minute belonged
Not to my mother. Or grandmother. But to Me.
Five minutes ago (again)
I relearnt that it’s not a lineage of compounded healing, accruing interest and growing over time like any good mutual fund
But a shared generational labor of continual, vigilant repair, pulling together that which has been riven, we wearily do it for everyone else all day long, we are learning to do it
STAT
Code BLUE
For ourselves, with precision, with skill, with dexterity, with purpose, we pull and pull that which would be torn from us, we pull together the edges of our agency and stand atop our newly remade wholeness.
This is why the world miscategorizes the feminine as an inherent healer, rather than seeing them as warriors guarding the territoryies of agency, freedom, body and bias. They think we are darning. We are stitching back the fabric of time to reclaim rule over it lest it slide sideways into coat hangers and brides in white mary jane shoes.
In the slippage, when it occurs
Sudden and fast and backward dragging
The job is to skate on knife edges
Sharp and sure through the technicolor edge and into the fold where I can climb on top,
Evading the grasping tide who think I’d look quite nice as a wife
As I am realizing Wife/Not to Wife was a choice I never thought about not making
I’m free anyway, there’s no unknowing, no unwaking the awakened, no theft that can change the realized into the the unknown once again. This is inconvenient for some, but for me: an afterburner on the heels of my skates. I shoot the gap, and time slides, but I dance above the slip, I escape the fold, I watch it all as it happen beneath.
As I do this, I transgress
I levitate I inflate I breathe the air of the sure self, the wide-legged, space-taking, verbose and gesticulating flesh suit, I revel in the lightness of taking up
all
this
space.
I let this magnificence of this transgression be a them problem and grow lighter still.
I watch those last five minutes roll around, again, and peel you, young one, right off their pages, unstick you from that fold, setting you on the ground in a new direction, where the world stays put under your strong feet, and you run, streaking, shot like a crossbow bolt straight, and true and strong.
You head wherever the fuck you want to go in as big a hurry as you’d like to be in to get there – you were born in the technicolor gap, threading the needle is nothing to you.
I relax a little. If it does slip again (and it will), you’ll have been there five minutes ago.
(again)
