Prefix – Poly

For impossibility. To be like father, stripped of womanhood – disemboweled. Femininity removed like a shroud. And yet I am female, there is no escaping it. Your very closeness, maleness, mocking my allusions to simulation.

Can there exist a relation in time where I do not run from the role of [m]other? To be dressed fully in your skin, amongst my musty books – the back-seat father is who I long to be, safely residing at a distance fit for thought and matter. The keen observer. The warm knee as you nestle into my cheek, listening to the gravel of my voice smoothing over your eyelids. Lipids of time, caught in a net of organza.

Like a once tame beast I lie between girldom and fatherhood. The two irrevocably intertwined to result in schizophrenic contusions to my mind, wherein girleens (to steal a Nabakovian turn of phrase) sprout phallic ganglia and grow to fondle their own desire. Girls do not become fathers I am told. But mothers, with mammary glands thick with the rancid echo of milk. For where do I go, except back to the well-thumbed pages of Lolita to search for sanity in their madness.

Humbert Humbert carries with him my own fear of womanliness, he sees them as ‘the coffin of coarse female flesh within which [his] nymphets are buried alive.’ [1] I too like a recumbent H.H. wish to hold onto girlish youth, and its pubescent beauty. For in order to become ‘mother’ I leave behind the balmy elms of childhood. And while I myself stay childless, I am able to always remain a girl, not yet a ‘woman’. With contraceptive devices enacting a halt to my monthly cycle, I linger forever encapsulated in a state of my perceived pre-womanhood. But now I have relinquished this synthetic hold, and I am again daunted with the swell of maturing ripeness. For now I am able to stave it off, still within the first wave of my returned cyclical shedding of rubied jewels, I feel pubescent, basking in that shadow of safe retreat.

[1] Vladimir Nabakov, ‘Lolita’. 1959. P. 173

sugar crystals encapusulated gold netting

Performance sketch for Glasgow International 2012 – Whistleblower your table shine is mine: Seduce and destroy.

Swan-like I am hunched over black mass, caressing its uneven contours, coveting its penetrating beauty, as I whisper my fantasies of masculinity into its open, glossy aperture. My voice resonates all around me, as if in taunt to my elocution.

I shift between whisper and high pitched whistle, moving on my haunches, the amber coloured liquid moves from state to state in a collorary to my emissions, I am aware of its slippages, between form and formlessness.

You a reflected circle that moves around my orbit – emitting a low hum in combat to my shrill tune, gradually affecting the liquid as it melancholically vibrates.

I pick and fumble, trying to push my fingers further in. I can feel it longing for its place of origin within me.

The oval mirror in my hand, picking up the glint of the frosted sequins that line my mouth, like scaled flesh, a wounded centre, a sequined vessel that lines my throat. The golden antechamber between inside and out. I fill myself through this hole. Hideously hungry, aroused, gaping and monstrous, I lie there pregnant with the unconsummated threat of my own invagination. Nothing seems able to satiate this hunger.

Its sticky sweet insides line the aperture of my mouth, molding to its form.

I go about my peristaltic action, as my own reflection circles me

I give birth to your form, as it glides from inside out, into sheaths of spun gold.

Dear hunter

Propped against the heavy hulk of the waste disposal, fresh snow on the ground, crisp beneath the crunch of my foot, as I stooped down to pick up the framed picture discarded on the floor. A strange calm emcompassed me. As I languidly cycled homeward, through trees and forests I dreamt of creatures that spoke and wardrobes that opened up into snowbound kingdoms. When I got to my place of comfort, I put the picture, cherished, in a spot that I could spy at it all day. Smiling I would glance at it between phone calls, and tooth pulling.

It reminded me of soft folds, and mothers arms. Of school games and hidden dresses. Of swimming classes, and ladies underwear. Of fighting against femininity, of being overwhelmed. Drunk on love for the father, and saving none for you.

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