Origin Complex Fire
5778
I dreamed as though the past was threaded through the future. I returned to find my losses where they were. I bumped along the wooden road of remembering, taught strangers songs I did not know. I led lives that were strangers to me, then my songs themselves became friends. The past grew known, drew nearer to the future. I gripped twisted fibers as though I wanted, swinging from frayed drapes. I worked in vehicles, listening (I had no office) to those who did not know— I knew the way but spoke too lowly, bled ordinary concept when I wrote. I did not determine the strength of my passivity or whether it was purposeful. I considered happiness if we arrived there again and happiness if we did not. If I left, I did it with will. If I disappeared without words of parting it was because external forces grown like tremors out of my silent story from when I was an object disappeared me, or because I go now by way of an adulthood. I did not mourn childhood. I did not mourn cadences. Because I was returned to body, not in need of it. I sprawled on dogs and rugs, so people standing over there ignored me. I lived and seemed not to. I divorced and told no one. I remarried to undo a blocked seam; stepped out of my body at the parting, then introduced myself to her, watched me return emergence to another method of returning, slinking in the shadow of the form made my former. Without moving shapes, I rose. I watered plants that had died, most in other rooms. None were burdens. I was listening to stories that told themselves silently. They were in the objects I touched or saw from distances, they were in the air. None of the things that happened had anything to do with me. I was not apparent, even to her. I pressed my hair into bricks. All surfaces were flesh to me then. I walked as though no places of division that spoke could sway me. What were the details of the tragedy? If they spelled sense, I might say. But the rugs were pink and gold-threaded on wooden floors of a future-building, and the dogs black retrievers. The retrievers came more frequently and the horses less often. I missed the horses, and the way I was not able to speak with them, but the sky turned orange. Some people said it was something. I did not speak of the horses again except to puddles I stepped in. One of the dogs allowed me to take his face in my palms. The friends I remembered, strangers, who were quiet for too long, then questioning— They wanted to know if still we were in the place where we were. I wanted someone to ask what was happening to me. A light chimed out of century. Some hands I saw in the distance were mine. They wanted to know many things, but could not even find their names.
“christmas” (a hegemony mythology)
the winter was very cold, elsewhere. I sat indoors and pretended to be devastated for 3 minutes. I experienced The Outside. we had a great fight. afterward, I came for an hour until my cells were obliterated into a different name, a different being. at least I was on the moon. at least you had no escape from yourself. at least the mirrors had been broken true. there was a pool of water at the bottom of the ocean, fresh and distinguished from the other water. I drank it, like the cool pink stream of my new boyfriend’s cum. by then, it was very late. it was precise and stable liquid, very good. water, or whatever of my power had fallen and then fled from a basement in your large intestine, now uncurled itself and panted like an effervescent wing of panther’s lifeblood at my feet. I slathered my body in The Fog. It was an expensive moisturizer, caused me to look wildly defined, almost overbright. People pitied themselves in my absence. animals glittered just by standing next to me. I leavened the hours, rewrote all 47 dreams ever in existence, divorced the echoes, ate for second breakfast 5 preeminent fates.
Maura Pellettieri is a writer and artist. Her writing can be found in the Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, the Literary Review, On The Seawall, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, the Adroit Journal, Guernica, Apogee, Tammy Journal, and others. She received her MFA in Writing at Washington University in St. Louis. She has given artist talks at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and other venues. Her work centers ecofuturist poetics, mutual care among interdiasporic networks, land consent, more-than-human personhood, and the speculative feminine. She uses Hebrew medicine, psychogeography, and deep listening practices to write and teach about the human relationship to Earth. She is a kohenet (traditional Hebrew ceremonialist) in galut who makes her home as a guest on Lisjan Ohlone land.