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Artist's Description:
Girl, this work is about how you can find freedom, become who you feel like you are. A girl at work becomes a bird, her friends fly next to her, who have lost their external appearance. 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. I listen to the excavations of
the nighttime sea whilst holding someone else’s little girl close to me. She awoke looking for her own Mum, but I was the next best thing she could find. I cradle her in my lap and marvel at her tiny forearm and curled up fist. I wonder have I held my own enough like this? Tight enough? For long enough? I hope I have. It just so happens that my name is Marvin. I don’t use it much, only for legal and medical purposes.
When I got to high school I started calling myself “Jim” and have ever since. Only the IRS and my doctor call me Marvin now. Actually, my doctor doesn’t. She calls me Jim, and I call her Katy because she’s so much younger than I am that I feel a little silly calling someone the age of my children by their honorific. I always know when one of her nurses is writing a message on her behalf because they call me Marvin. Then I message her back as Dr. Katy so it doesn’t seem like we’re too familiar or anything. That wouldn’t be appropriate, being familiar with my doctor, even though I am. The question of names comes up because I’m thinking of changing mine. I never did before because my mother gave me the name Marvin and I kept it because I rather liked my mother. If my father had given it to me I’d have changed it a long time ago, probably to something like Luke or Max, a name more appropriate to my personality. Do I sound like a Marvin to you? I kept my father’s name even though it’s unpronounceable and unspellable in English. They tell me it’s okay in Danish, but they also tell me I’m unable to pronounce it correctly. So I guess it’s a wash. We both win, or lose, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, I kept it because my grandfather insisted that the clerk at Whitehall spell it right when he immigrated. If not for that my family would be called something sensible like Rasmussen since his first name was Rasmus. Trigger Warning: mental health, suicidal thoughts, self-harm
Anticipation of what was coming was in some ways worse than the panic attack itself. The thundering of her heart pounded in her ears. Vibrating numbness creeped into her fingertips. Clenching her fists, she willed herself to relax. Flames licked the sides of her face. The swirling pressure rising in her chest burst forth. Unable to restrain herself any longer she grasped for anything solid. Her vision fading and consciousness draining away. She could feel herself sinking into a pit. Suffocating flames of black consuming her. Finally, nothingness. I was almost a relief. Her eyebrows raised to aid in the opening of her eyes, she turned her head slowly. The thick fog that obscured her vision slowly cleared. She could feel her soul slowly refilling her deflated body. She always manages to survive what felt like certain death. She tried to reattach her hands to her body. All the connections in her brain seemed severed. Her head churned and oozed. Forming thoughts felt like treading in molasses. Bounding into the room, unaware of their mother’s fragile mental state, the children came. So many arms begging to be held. Request after request buzzed from their mouths. Her quiet recovery was short lived. The reality of motherhood slapped her in the face. There were diapers to be changed. She had to make sure dinner got on the table and soon. No one has any clean clothes, not that anyone had bathed yet this week. Clean clothing wasn’t going to hide the dirt. The small off-white kitchen was so filthy even the rats weren’t interested. The dishes that filled the grim ringed sink would have to be washed before she could even start to make dinner. “You can’t get clean dishes from dirty water.” Bottom paw-black hair damp / from self-absorbed licking, forepaw wet / with saliva from the
mouse’s wet kiss; befriending like this at the beginning / is always a trick, but mouse is smarter; she understands yet plays along while fooling herself into thinking it’s a strategic move when in reality she’s avoiding the real question: what happens if you stop playing along? Why is she afraid to find out when she’s known for sneaking past rodent traps and stealing string cheese? She’s a thief on her own, yet she bows down to someone bigger than her—is she scheming something or simply submitting because being the victim might cover for her swiped cheese? / Her sins? / What type of metaphor is this anyway? Most would interpret that the mouse is my haplessness and the cat is my traitorous fake friend, but actually I’m both—see, this is why I don’t play with metaphors; I can’t stand shrouding truth and getting it brushed over like bangs of guise, yet there is no other way for me / to put it: I feign love and friendship while acting as cat and mouse with myself and whoever it is I envy. I envy I think that you might be a sunrise
the kind that warms a mountain morning and melts the late summer frost So I think that makes this moment the morning and I think that makes me the land hesitantly accepting light But remember that I have grown accustomed to the chill and dark mystery of night so that might make you a wonder to me I. Waning
You wake to the sound of glass, swiping the impact-induced stars for sight. Wincing at your sunset-bruised skin, you tumble across concrete like a stale coin toss, ready to confess. But when your eyes swell like the bare coin bag in your hand, with every toss that ends in another, you only have one choice, which is to draw. II. Waning In solitude, you try to recall yesterday’s skin-deep dream: backhanded remarks as he cleared the cards Through captivity, you learn that the saturated smell of metal rusting over every bet stings more than its sound. That under the impression of love, there is cupidity, which steals more time than love. As your eyes trace his lips and the edges of his cigar, he sits there, mustached, smoking his dreams. Your ears turn numb from saccharine comments that auto-populates on his tongue with every loss, that darling, I am doing this, so we can sustain a life. Once more, he reaches down to forfeit his coins, giving up more than he owns. It’s not that I fear change
I think I might be lying to myself. Always so determined to find eternity in a single moment I’m scared of losing what I care for you’re a hoarder, you cling on too much, you come on too strong You’re Desperate. they say and I just add what they say to my pile I was given a bouquet once by someone I don’t talk to anymore Of flowers in the brightest colors I’ve ever seen and the kind of sticky pollen smell that always seemed to linger but as it always does, Time remains the villain in my story I frantically tried to learn how to preserve the blossoms I was burdened with; Three cardboard boxes were what she could afford. It would have to do. The tired,
whisper of a woman, her yellowed hair tightly pulled back because she knew there would be no time to wash it, put the boxes in the cart. They looked small, so small and the cart so absurdly empty that she took them out and carried them to the front of the store. The cashier greeted her with a $12.00 an hour smile. “Find everything you were looking for?” she asked in a voice that sounded like she’d asked the question ten thousand times already that day. The yellow-haired woman thought about that, wanted to say ‘no, she hadn’t found everything she was looking for; that she had been looking most of her life and hadn’t found it yet; that she was, frankly, god-damned tired of looking.’ “Just the boxes,” she replied simply. “Looks like someone’s moving,” the cashier remarked a little too cheerfully. “Yes, moving,” said the yellow-haired woman and then, vacantly added, “out.” “That’ll be $4.75.” The yellow-haired woman carefully counted out the money, two singles and an assortment of quarters, dimes and nickels. She could feel the people in line behind her staring, knew that they were annoyed at how long this was taking. And she didn’t care because she had stopped caring about what other people thought of her. The ceiling fan spun a cord of leaden weight in perfect orbit round her room.
It hit and chipped the mounted crucifix with a rhythmic tap tap tap, drawing circles round the plans she’d made on Sundays for plumming string. Beneath closed eyes she drifted through the whooshing scape and wandered back to that midnight wood, where hollowed trees she’d marked in crossing pen X and stumbled past at nearing dawn through nettled weeds to homestead. |