let’s take hold: after Lisa Robertson’s First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant (Belladonna* Chaplet #75)
let’s take hold
after Lisa Robertson’s First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant (Belladonna* Chaplet #75)
let’s begin here.
where we linger.
a delay is a minimal interval.
let’s begin where want begins.
neither to study.
nor to ask.
no impossible fitness.
no determined direction.
no chimerical perfection.
no parties, no parties,
no parties, no parties,
no parties, no past.
no politics flows through a girl.
language suspends itself.
a kind of animal act.
we’re hard proving.
in lightly ideal conditions.
that Lucretius invented the pleasurable earth.
this is no pasture of the meantime.
this dirt is zapped and thriving.
quickened with the incessance of work.
we’re still rotating.
receiving dirt.
and flourishing.
thinking flora with ritual again.
with limitless limbs and so forth.
each fruit and sense receiving.
the shapes of leaves:
the slightly bitter textures of leaves:
the most intimate aspects of leaves:
I made a broth from roots made of wood.
I made a parallel material medication.
good for the gut, good for the nerves.
I become tasting, startling and absorbing.
I become the sky, with its various minerals.
I become rubbish, washed up on the shore.
I am thrown here, tasting ravenous.
I am thrown headlong, as if falling.
I am in hunger, and lacking in form.
I want limbs.
real tissues.
a fragrance.
I want surplus.
some combination.
of space and swerve.
want is a surplus of speculation.
a catalogue of comportment.
a circumstance without causation.
everything ravenous resists.
the frequency of this movement.
the synesthesia of this eating.
let’s take hold of this semblance.
sustain situation, rather than appetite.
and attend only to this falling.
relax also.
and absorb volume.
honey, sap, and foam.
eyes are vital.
thirsty eyes and strangers.
must I strangers?
luck wakes up unctuous bodies.
quickened with intention.
weaving no human location.
we walk headlong
to the uncertain site.
where absence ends.
not to be absent.
but much does drip.
and escape.
not to be hunger.
not to be different.
in no other danger.
we use up the colour.
we use up the cattle.
we use up the flesh.
we use this information.
to study the scale of atoms.
the institution of space.
we’re hungry.
we use this excess.
to make belief.
we sigh at the sky with habit.
the cry of the flesh is monstrous.
finally you see the shape of our need.
let’s take hold of giving.
something astonishing.
with deep reverence.
let’s take hold.
J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and lecturer asking questions about place, displacement, climate, and colonialism across performance, print, and digital media. Information about her were is available on her website: https://luckysoap.com
