Quietest, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, University of California, Irvine, 2018.
Online performance for launch event at Stories Books and Cafes, Los Angeles, 2018
In this lyric essay, materials and feelings orientate slow forms of empirical knowledge making, with reference to words from Anne Carson and Yve Lomax, amongst others. A fictional interaction with an artwork at the MAC Belfast, loosely based upon an animation by artist Olwyn Carrol, is a point of departure for scenes which unfold as 'the light is failing slightly, dimming, becoming more cool.'
'From the screens, I hear a voice sound, like someone singing out of tune,
'between the taking place of the world and the taking place of the world.' Each curl of smoke malignant and probing, the flex of a foot both terryfying and yearning, disassociates self from the voice, splits feeling. A taking place of lurid and frenetic life, a 'pure arising' plucking figure from class and heteronormative slyness.
Tears roll over the body of her, him, or plant. Not just leaking from eyes but falling from knees and from limbs like expressed milk; multicoloured.
Aha! This video must make feeling, then split feeling, across screens where 'the person, or thing, (is) trying to tell you something.' A flash of the quotidian in a frightening admission of identity. Not an originator or 'I' but stereotype-er, her, protagonist's stare, unsure of self, modeled on symbols of loneliness, kissing the layers of glass pane mirroring wet, shaved lenses. Paint stops up the looking through glass until mirrors appear, suited up brilliant like men who talk in different matter-of-fact ways. Now, how a 'resemblance may intend identity but disclose difference' seems to swing slowly between the fronts of a couples' photographed conventions and sadness, until the sharing of something, the repositioning of nothing, reveals all the surface composed; 'not a question of likeness' but the light corrals swiftly a glint in their eyes when 'we may fear we have fallen into the mirror''
About Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters
First published in 1992 by founding editor Alyn Warren, Faultline is UC Irvine’s Pushcart prize-winning journal. Housed in UC Irvine’s Department of English and produced by the graduate students of the Programs in Writing, Faultline features the work of emerging and established writers from the U.S. and abroad. The journal publishes new poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, translations, and art in an annual spring issue.