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Artist's Description:
Masks, most often behind some external expression the inner world is hidden, my masks are people. Their flight and appeal to nature connects them with the living world. The mask is a certain entity, and it is a woman, at least everything I write I personify with a woman... I want to show with my work that in addition to appearance, there is something internal, something that is important and needs to be preserved, that perhaps does not appear externally and can only be known through a deeper conversation. My mother bred me
In the womb of an abyss My nourishment, A healthy diet Of bits and pieces She tore off of herself And when I was birthed – Another scar on her skin – She raised me in the mandate Of the ever-evolving People. A girl, they called me, The word rising From their cold lips Like a blight, a taint, - Something to be ashamed – A child, I never was Always a girl, a girl Left on the hospital bed To unfurl And to learn the ways Of the world. Didn’t I tell you not to take it seriously?
Didn’t I tell you to put your hands in those torn pockets sometimes? Look For something in that old raincoat’s lining For something under the rugs Under your eyelid – with lashes behind – Under the iris – as it’s cut by a paper – But Keep calm darling, keep calm – It’s a paper, not a knife; once it is wet, it never cuts – Keep calm darling, keep calm Something will be found Something before the cleavers reach the lambs’ sternum Something before two malignant breasts, on the butcher block Before blood, seeping out from a freezer bag on the kitchen table: – 700 grams of me. Adios. It is not easy to love me…I know.
There are days when I'm a storm. I will send you winds, tears and a hurricane of love, disguised and burned. And I don’t want to beg, I don't want you to come back out of pity and see me cry. I think about everything, I don't sleep. I mask my pain with irony. It's not easy being with me… I am chaos, the tree without roots. I'll be your friend and we'll sing in the rain, I will leave ,if you are kissing memories. It's not easy...trust me, I know. But that is the way I love- to the limit, to madness, to the end… So strong. And forever. Trigger warning: mentions of assault
The first time my mother cried, I told her about the madwoman in the attic, The inherent darkness enveloping her entire existence as she got engulfed in the banality of her life. The woman who contemplated through a man’s voice, the woman whose voice screamed out the rasp crisp reality of her essence, which revolved around the madness of her simplicity, the yearning for her ‘wild’ nature. I explained how she etched the routine of her everyday life on a piece of paper, a delicate, white, thin symbol of rebelliousness that she permitted herself in secrecy. The paper which, when written upon, held the power to liberate her thoughts from the husband she was coerced into, the children she had endured the pain for. A paper, which, if discovered, would shroud her behind the attic’s darkness forever because it was forbidden to imagine she possessed a sense of self, a consciousness that didn’t stem from her husband. Yet, she wrote and as she wrote, she wept for the sons she had given birth to– the ones who would never be her own though she tore herself apart for them. She wept for the daughters, stashing away some papers behind her pillow, for she knew, one day her daughters would be where she was, confined in the attic, forbidden to cry. Mother, if it made her isolated and blue, why did she cry? I wish I had a name that looked good when it was written in blue icing on a birthday cake. The unsatisfying almost loop of the “j” The long drawn out “a” sound that everyone always tells me I say with an accent and the rushed finale of a canceled TV show that is the “k” all because of that silent “e”
i impersonate your mother without even trying,
and you hate me just because. i am everything you didn’t like about the person who raised you and i grew up being formula-fed resentment towards the woman you say i resemble, so it comes as no surprise that you get to tell me all the things you couldn’t tell a dying woman- i can take it, right? [just tell it to her grave, why don’t you?] we are avoiding the dead woman weighing us down- tergiversation personified in our every conversation; and a dead martyr is puppeteering our inevitable separation. and i am already your mother reincarnated but this time, you are raising me but you are back in 1975 with the mother you are embarrassed of- fast forward to 2016 and your daughter makes the same goddamn mistakes and you are wondering what this could possibly be karma for- i know you are thinking it but i will never ask you directly, not if i know what is best for me. we are skirting around the obvious, a sort of potentially fatal waltz- one wrong move and i am impaled I think on the patriarchy
as I hang out laundry and of the week I went on strike heavily pregnant fed up with the weighted task. My husband forced then to wash hang fold repeat renamed the laundry room ‘The Magdalene’ I think of those poor women sentenced to a life of laundry with their babies taken away. i’m still afraid of everything
a man can touch and make his a woman i love is attending a tea party whipped cream ribbons pink pepper spray appendage her head in my lap coevolved with flowers, hummingbirds only nectar and sugar water they want us bird-boned hang feeders on their creaky porches and watch from the window Trigger warning: character death, mild profanity, child neglect
She’s much younger than me, and that cherubic innocence clings to her plump cheeks, and I know when she giggles she does not know I hate her. The shirt she wears, whose pink leopard print pattern is joined by old spaghetti sauce stains, used to belong to me, but I feel no connection to that age. Maybe someday she’ll be 17 too and washing dishes while a sister that’s eleven years her junior sits cross-legged in front of the TV, and she’ll remember bitching about the days-old broccoli Mom told me to cook up and feel bad. Right now she’s remorseless, getting cookie crumbs all over the couch and bobbing her head to the Law and Order theme music. I’ll have to remember to change the channel to cartoons before Mom gets home. It’s anyone’s guess when Mom will roll in. She gets off work at the diner at nine, but usually stays out to do fuck all while I have to scrub broccoli bits from Lydia’s teeth and tell my friends yet again I can’t hang out tonight, I have work to do and someone has to watch Lydia, but next weekend maybe I’ll be free. Usually she comes back smelling of alcohol, or someone’s car, half the time wearing different clothes than she left in. It’s better than when she doesn’t come home alone, and I have to contend with another shifty-eyed jerk who can’t quite decide how to behave around me. I don’t have much of an income, outside of pocketing a percentage of the money Mom gives me for the necessities she can’t be bothered to buy herself, but I bought a lock for my bedroom door. Would’ve gotten one for Lydia’s too, but she always has to get up in the middle of the night to pee, and she’s not smart enough to operate machinery yet. I even have to rescue her from her own bedroom when her chunky fingers can’t get the door open. In any case, I could wake up at the quietest creak of a floorboard. That is, before I simply stopped sleeping altogether. |