ROXANNE
JEN
FISHER
TIARA
DESUETUDE ©2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ALEXX MARIE VALENCIA SALAD OF A DELIGHTS
WHITNEY BARD The Void Part 1
The void cannot be touched through a lace caul. Remaining in reality is reticence to release. Reality is restraint. What if the cage was always open? There is no meaning to an alternate universe, only beautiful alienation. Beauty is meaningless without context. Beauty is relational—a red flower is beautiful because other things are not red. Beauty is oppositional—she is red because other things are not red. A complimentary color is in dialogue with her surroundings. Compassion actually lives at the bottom of the ocean. Where it’s cold and dark; you have to have known it, you have to have been there to know. Once you have you don’t ever dry or forget the wet. The mouth is red and wet and the lips are parentheses, they are licked open, licked closed, circling the sentence, the dark guts inside the body of the text. The mouth is trying to get the message to the throat. The throat is trying to swallow the premise that discomfort pays off. The throat is choking, choking is rejecting, refusing. “Beauty is fleeting” gains new meaning, disappointment comes so quickly.
WHITNEY BARD THE VOID PART 1 CONTINUED
The anxieties of a fleeting beauty lounge: fading, holding, grasping. Missing. Retaining emptiness tightly in the clutch of a closed fist, fingernails in palm. Fleeting is leaving but also being seen. Being seen is passive, is receptive, fleeting is running is moving is active. Slipping into a different dimension, through a puddle, we fell into the narrative that surrounded us. Your way of telling me was showing me the shadow. Knowing that meaning is ascribed by the subject, we are free to shape whatever form leads to and reveals the outcome. Metaphors are a tonal language. If beauty is necessarily generative (procreative) (a carnivorous plant) can you take me, press against me, make a copy of me—is connective tissue passively colonial, unfolding, strewing pollen, a chalice, a gargling throat, can the font be drunk directly or is that too hot divine? You can’t shut the door but it can disappear. I can’t touch it, it’s dipped in red oil. It’s full of meaning. How do I feed her? What does she eat? I promise you, I know how to walk backwards. The smell of hawthorn, the taste of eating
WHITNEY BARD THE VOID PART 1 CONTINUED
before entering: you’re in front of me but but only partly. If I am the pattern you are the matching. Again, holding the pink shell, blind-tasting the site where we drown. Smooth and calcified, contours sidling around corners. Wrapping around tongue trapping intention, muddying proportion. Did you do it because someone said not to? Wrapping is the slow writhe, holding is constriction, being present is surveillance, intimacy is ritualistic, sharing is payback. Being like the words in a song, I am arcing forwards, hinging in the shape of humility. Falling, folded, slipping, towards the belowest point, begging the sun not to set, rolling towards lights reflected in dark salt, just faded breath like butter and bile, soft and sharp. You can hear me say your name. You call to me. I sleep with a knife under my pillow. My skin gets hot. Stays hot. Forgets, has forgotten but unreleased, shaking burning into bending. If life alone is not enough—bursting forth into existence, unassigned—then tell me how to lay meaning across all signs like salt bleeding into fresh water.
Camelia 1, xeroxed film collage, 2019, Whitney Bard.
WHITNEY BARD
Mosaic Underwater looks the same as midnight. Sleeping on a bed of broken glass after falling through the window, after pushing you, after being pushed. The same as being carried away like smoke on the wind, flowing up and cold. The picture is pasty, grainy, yellow red. We can remember this, we can picture this. We can file it. We can refile it. I am slicing open my self, moving quickly, not meaning to. I am dipping my finger in bleach again. I am cauterizing my self, I am staunching the contamination. I am working and dipping my finger in bleach and working again. I am not healing. I am festering. I am hiding the infection. I am going slower than I should. I am wincing and plating. I am getting through this shift.
Fallacies of constitution are the shape of a balloon filled with helium, senseless and round. The bond between here on the ground and floating away is blinding, burning, magnetic. Pouring into me, heavy as sand but just as disintegrated. I don’t think it should be a stain I think it should be a bruise. Forgetting the sharpness of acute pain gives way to a banal ache of emptiness where something used to have electricity and now is as compelling as a half cup of cold coffee. Like a beautiful day, just because something is fine once doesn’t mean that it will be next time. It’s an out of focus knowing, the taste of a crushed aluminum can, trash cookie, soda puck—shoved in my mouth, dented gag.
WHITNEY BARD
Whitney Bard is a writer living in Brooklyn where she is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at The New School. She is the Deputy Editor of The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, a publication exploring the intersection of food and literature. Her work has been published in Violet Strays, Crooked Teeth and Hooligan Magazine.
Camelia 2, xeroxed film collage, 2019, Whitney Bard.
IAN LOCKABY Two poems in translation by Carlos Cociña from “Jardines” or, “Gardens” (1) LOS CAMINANTES, mirando el espacio, son tocados por la proliferación de fotones. Entre las formas verticales, el viento forma arpas asonantes. Por lo mismo no veo a la persona en el lugar no habitual. Aquél es el testimonio frágil de los refuerzos que mantienen permanente el movimiento de las hojas horizontales. Cuando más de la mitad no es retenido, las disfunciones de lo cotidiano se extienden por las ramas. La repetición de los paisajes no constituye bahía de los huecos de las memoria. Permite la intensidad eliminar las pantallas que cubren los depósitos vacíos de significación semántica. La duda es entre los diferentes trazados que son peripecias del retroceso. Me instalo en la difusa huella amnésica.
IAN LOCKABY
Estos parques comienzan a llenarse de imágenes religiosas. Estamos fuera de bases cuando la humedad de aire llega casi al punto de saturación. Nada se mueva fuera de las luces en las ventanas de las construcciones. Mientras los perros dirigen sus cabezas al interior, algunos gatos observan la calle tras las protecciones. El olor a tierra a punto de humedecerse el inocuo y los pastos y vegetaciones adquieren un color imperceptible, mientras las imágenes brillan en las velas. Los jardines intactos han perdido sus horizontes. Los parques en cultivo se elevan con un tupido velo por sobre los edificios y toman rumbos inusitados. Dejan atrás el florecimiento y se encuentran con otros equinoccios donde caen líquidos entre las sombras de las construcciones. Estas extensiones tienen el rito de la tierra en la cual beben para nuevamente alejarse. Los otros asentamientos han dejado espacio para su tronadura y los jardines no hacen sino posarse para volver a su continuidad.
IAN LOCKABY
(1) THE WANDERERS, gazing at space, are touched by the proliferation of photons. Among the vertical forms, the wind forms assonant harps. For this reason, I do not see the person in the unusual place. That is fragile testimony of the reinforcements which permanently maintain the movement of horizontal leaves. When more than half is not retained, the dysfunctions of the everyday extend through the branches. The repetition of landscapes doesn’t constitute bay in the hollows of memory. It allows brightness to eliminate the screens that cover the empty deposits of semantic meaning. The question is between different outlines which are vicissitudes of the relapse. I install myself in the dim amnesiac trace.
IAN LOCKABY
These parks begin to fill themselves with religious images. We are caught off-guard when the humidity of the air nearly reaches the point of saturation. Nothing moves besides the lights in the windows of the constructions. While the dogs direct their heads to the interior, some cats observe the street from behind protections. The smell of earth at the point of humidifying is innocuous and the grasses and vegetations acquire an imperceptible color, while the images gleam in the candles. The intact gardens have lost their horizons.
The parks in cultivation rise with a dense veil above the buildings and take unusual courses. They leave the blooming behind and encounter other equinoxes where liquids fall among shadows of the constructions. These extensions have the rite of the earth in that which they drink to recede again. The other settlements have left space for their blasting and the gardens do nothing but set themselves to return to their continuity.
IAN LOCKABY
(2) EL EXCESO DE PASTIZALES en las cumbres no impide la libre circulación de otras vegetaciones. Al final del parque han perdido la pista y vagan interminablemente en la nieve. No hay confines en los espacios de vegetaciones y las mismas construcciones son horizontes que se disuelven en la primera aproximación. Las partículas sólidas de las nubes se posan sobre los objetos, sin medir más justificación. No son jardines acuáticos sino de agua los que se extienden en las elevaciones. Mirados desde abajo sus raíces están siempre en la distancia más corta. No tienen más sombras que la disección de la luz en la imaginación. El roce se parece al tacto de las equivocaciones cuando dos líquidos están tranquilos. Para poder vislumbrar las fuentes de luz, hay que entrecerrar la vista y dejar el oído en el suspenso del cuerpo. Nuevamente los jardines escalonados escurren tras las construcción. Más arriba diversas lagunas semisecas saltan sobre sueños. Sólo la fuerza permite el juego de la permanencia. Triple es el grito de la perfección errante. En transición, la figura en el mirador observa la muralla enramada que lo circunada. Sólo en la bóveda se ve pasar luz. El otro espacio iluminado está bajo los pies.
IAN LOCKABY
(2) THE EXCESS OF PASTURES on the summits doesn’t impede the free circulation of other vegetations. At the end of the park they have lost the trail and wander interminably in the snow. There are no confines in spaces of vegetation and the constructions themselves are horizons that dissolve into the first approximation. The solid particles of the clouds perch upon objects, without further justification. They are not aquatic gardens but those of water that extend on the elevations. Viewed from below their roots are always in the nearest distance. They have less shadows than the dissection of light in the imagination. The light graze resembles the touch of mistakes when liquids are calm. To be able to glimpse the sources of light, one must squint and leave the ear in suspense of the body. Once again the stepped gardens drain off behind the construction. Higher up, various semi-dry lagoons leap upon dreams. Only force permits the game of permanence. Triple is the turn of errant perfection. In transition, the figure in the lookout observes the bowered wall that encircles him. Only in the vaulting is light seen passing. The other illuminated space is underfoot.
IAN LOCKABY
Carlos Cociña was born in Concepcion, Chile in 1950, and has lived in Santiago for over three decades. One of the most important poets of the famous Generacion de los ochentas, Cociña’s first book, Aguas Servidas, was published in 1981, after a year of battling the Pinochet government’s censorship boards. In the following decades, the collection, which was often passed hand to hand in photocopied pages, earned Cociña the status of an underground legend. In recent years, Cociña has witnessed a surge in appreciation for his work, especially among younger generations of Chilean poets, due in part to the 2008 reissue of Aguas Servidas and in larger part to the continued production of his distinctive, innovative poetry. Recent collections, such as El margen de la propia vida (Alquimia ediciones, 2013) which won the Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago, and La casa devastada (Alquimia, 2017), which won the Premio Círculo de Críticos de Arte de Chile, further the singular poetic vision that he’s been refining for over 40 years. Cociña maintains the website, www.poesiacero.cl, where he’s been experimenting with digital publication of his works since 2002.
IAN LOCKABY
Ian U Lockaby is a poet and translator, the Assistant Editor and Translations Editor at New Delta Review, and a current MFA candidate at Louisiana State University. His poems have recently appeared in APARTMENT, Bomb Cyclone, CutBank, and Timber, and his translation of Carlos Cociùa’s Gardens is forthcoming as a chapbook from Desuetude Press.
Untitled, Photograph, 2011, Olga Mikolaivna.
ALEXX MARIE VALENCIA One in a room with us significant case file on the bedside table a broken lamp by the door signifies a robbery take an inventory of the displaced and damaged What has been rifled What has been removed Footsteps leading to the open window handprints on the foggy mirror Crime scene investigation Looking for clues and Holding your eyes Two in a room with us The heart monitor makes shapes of butterflies and other bugs The tape recorder catches a small whisper Leaving the examination room sicker than before Leaving the building even sicker still The tape pours out of the machine like sludge And makes that clicking register sound Over and over A fan can only circulate so much air until the whole 1st floor triage is stale A room occupied Immovable idea keeps doors locked tiresome as it is, the curtains are washed monthly lest the soot and dust leaves too much of an impression on the space, in this time. Linens are changed, blankets turned down to maintain some sense of someones something While scratches on the floor from sharp heels and shards of glass remain neglected and sacred
ALEXX MARIE VALENCIA
Alexx Marie Valencia was born Alexandra Marie Valencia in 1992 and spent her childhood in Rockville, Maryland, fifteen minutes from Seneca Creek State Park, filming location for the Blair Witch Project. Switched high schools, child of divorce, moved often.
TIARA ROXANNE Territorial Dehiscence / Clay (a preface, a note, a manual rupture) Put the body in the water and write. Lay down in the mud and write. Uproot the body and write.
Since we are stuck in bodies, there is no way out of this trauma or these violences. The Indigenous body is continually faced with and oppressed by colonialism through forced reorientation within political, cultural and technological frameworks. We, Indigenous peoples, are the trauma body. This perpetual experience is felt somatically as well as fleshly which necessitates a breach.
TIARA ROXANNE
Dehiscence is a rupture.
Rupture is a noun and a verb. As a noun, it means to “breach of peace or concord,” to “open hostility or war between nations,” “the tearing apart of a tissue” and finally, “a breaking apart or the state of being broken apart.” As a verb, rupture means, “to part by violence: break or burst,” to create or induce a breach of [something],” and as an intransitive verb, “to have or undergo a rupture” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). Rupture applies to syntax as well. To tear apart the sentence, to detonate the name or the phrase is to break open grammar and burst into transformation.
To split is to begin to transform.
Dehiscence or dehiscentia or dehiscenterm derives from ‘dehiscere’ which means to gape, to open, split down (of the earth). Dehiscence is rooted in the performance of splitting and was first conceived in the fields of medicine and botany. Within the medicinal canon, dehiscence provokes the antithesis of healing, what is called “wound dehiscence” is a surgical complication, where the splitting occurs along the lines of the suture. More generally, this kind of dehiscence is one of anatomical madness, as the wound is susceptible to reopening and infection over variants of time until finally closing which is usually recognized by the formation of scar tissue.
TIARA ROXANNE
More flesh memory.
In Otology, dehiscence is a puncture to the inner ear which results in vertigo, and in the botanical sense, the rupture is the healing or the reaching toward healing. Or rather, as the recovery, as the beginning of something new or different. The reproduction of a seed and its emergence out of the earth as a sapling displays both possibility and reterritorialization, as it ruptures, survives and begets pollination. It is becoming, arriving and returning. For each meaning of dehiscence, a rupture occurs, however, the result varies and presents a different form prior to its previous state.
It transforms.
Dehiscence offers a significant kaleidoscope of perspective provided the framework of subjectivity which filters the wound or seed or the self that it splits. Each enable their own event, their own outcome when encountering this rupture. So how do we apply dehiscence to the colonized / Indigenous topography from which it is reproduced? How does one rupture the sentence, decode the line, detonate the syntax, the data? Since healing is unattainable because colonization is not curable, my preliminary response to these questions are founded in the decolonial gesture and / or rupture. The decolonial gesture is non-linear, as it approaches decolonization but never fully finds itself decolonized. It is an act. It is on-going. And for Indigenous peoples, we return to nature. We return to the earth and homeland of Indigeneity. We return to clay.
TIARA ROXANNE
Clay is the flesh of the earth.
Clay, for Indigenous peoples, cultivates community, tradition, and ritual. Clay is dyadic and collective memory. It is archival. Clay is intergenerational. It comes from Indigenous homeland and is multipurpose. Clay is flesh memory. It tracks and traces memories and historicities. Clay tells a story without using language. It is a material substance that does not need language or dialectics to understand its importance. It speaks. Clay is mother-tongue. It is a syntactical material narrative for Indigenous peoples. Sculpting something from the earth from which one belongs to, with the body, becomes a physical gesture that encounters subjectivity, contingency, situatedness as well as the material. The production of clay requires the unsettling of territory and thereby is a decolonial gesture responding to settler colonialism in the material and the digital worlds.
To resist. To return. To rupture.
Clay for Indigenous peoples is a sacred material. It holds a cosmological and cultural meaning as it derives from nature. And nature, for Indigenous cultures and tribes, holds divine power, i.e. the cosmological. Many Indigenous cosmologies arrive at creation from earth, which clay is formed from. To open the wound of earth and create a resource for survival or a signature of Indigenous culture is a decolonial gesture made by and only by Indigenous peoples.
TIARA ROXANNE
A decolonial gesture is territorial dehiscence.
One must rupture the earth to cultivate clay, thereby creating a territorial dehiscence. This territorial dehiscence is a process that requires corporeality and earth, a materiality that denies a need for language or dialectics. It decodes the body by returning to one’s land, one’s identity and cultivates a material that is a symbol for Indigeneity, Indigenous territory, Indigenous homeland, Indigenous tradition, Indigenous community and overall history. It is a story of Indigeneity. The gesture not only desilences by using the body, by returning to one’s land, by cultivating community, by reclaiming one’s identity, it also contemporizes Indigeneity. We are still here. This contemporization, this reterritorialization, is accessed as: rupture in order to return or return in order to rupture to return to desilence, reclaim and recover, as it transforms.
TIARA ROXANNE
References:
Barber, Daniel Colucciello, and Jared Sexton. “On Black Negativity, Or the Affirmation of Nothing.” Society and Space, SAGE, 18 Sept. 2017, societyandspace.org/2017/09/18/on-black-negativity-or-the-af firmation-of-nothing/. “Dehiscence.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-web ster.com/dictionary/dehiscence.
Hunter, Susan, et al. “Understanding Wound Dehiscence.” Nursing, vol. 37, no. 9 Sept. 2007, pp. 28–29. Isely, Duane, et al. “Fabales.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 4 June 2018. https://www.britannica.com/plant/Fabales. “Rupture.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-web ster.com/dictionary/rupture. Wallace, David. “Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present.” The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/per sons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of the-present.
TIARA ROXANNE
Tiara Roxanne (PhD) is an Indigenous cyberfeminist, scholar and artist based between Berlin and NYC. Her research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between the Indigenous Body and AI. More particularly, she explores the colonial structure embedded within artificial intelligence learning systems in her writing and her performance art through textile. Currently her work is mediated through the color red. She received the Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa University in 2013 where she graduated from with her MFA. Under the supervision of Catherine Malabou, Tiara completed her dissertation, “Recovering Indigeneity: Territorial Dehiscence and Digital Immanence� in June 2019. Tiara has presented her work at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), re:publica (Berlin), Tech Open Air (Berlin), AMOQA (Athens), among others. She is currently a Researcher at DeZIM-Institut.
JEN FISHER dislocation of time I wake to the white wall is a screen for memories like movies playing out in front of memy anxiety and emptiness is anger this time of year the birth a spring to, the sickness extreme, heavy the weight, a distance of deathI never learned how to take care of myself a daytoday’s survivalin the air a pressure dropsI can’t find the pleasure or the familiar
JEN FISHER
how you get the grease stains out in 2007
I watchedit began to boil I walkedit began to go away
walk away never paid the last electric bill or rent, no 2 week/ one month notice
don’t notice me I didn’t say goodbye/ or that I would callI told my childhood self, never to writeor visit- that
she never existed I had a plan- I had a visionthe day I left I felt I was the living i promised I would never go home again and i delivered
sometimes we once were children
JEN FISHER
Jen Fisher born 1981 in Florida Poet and Street Bookseller in the East Village Lives and works in New York City Has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, online at The Poetry Project, Newest York, F magazine, Cixous72, Daggers Magazine, Heads Magazine, and the Quarterless Review Interviews in SpectorBooks Catalog and Newest York online magazine
SALAD OF A THOU
CURATED BY J
OUSAND DELIGHTS
JAMES MAEDA
SALAD OF A THOUSAND DELIGHTS
With selections from the Olympia Flyer Archive, James Maeda curates a brief glimpse into the first twenty years of punk in Olympia, Washington, spanning from around 1980 to 2001. Seen through the lens of punk flyers and other memorabilia, this subjective inquiry takes us back through a momentous period of music, and the city of Olympia.
SALAD OF A THOUSAND DELIGHTS
We hope to enliven the visions of Olympia one might have, creating a kaleidoscope of past and present. Through the unraveling of Olympia’s music story, KAOS has been found as the antenna for punk of this town, transmitting messages and vibrations into the creation of the Tropicana, the North Shore Surf Club, G.E.S.C.C.O., Reko Muse, the Backstage of the Capitol Theatre, the Uncola, the Midnight Sun, the Gnu Deli, and other venues including punk houses which have been and will be integral in the continuum of music in Olympia.
Issue 1
46° 55’ 48.00” N -122° 49’ 48.00” W https://desuetudegallery.com