orangeheart

i say fuck y'all
i stab the bitches with a chainsaw

this morning on the crisis line the mother of a 15-year-old rape survivor told me, "you are so calm. how are you so calm?" maybe she mistook "tired" for "calm." maybe i'm tired of what i do. but i do. & i go on. with my eyes open & forcing myself. onward.

so today i feel like a leonard cohen song. but i am listening to david bowie instead. & wearing a shirt as orange as a box of tide.

(trying to translate, for beck the other night, "el corazï¿½n naranja." she thought it was parallel to "artichoke heart." thinking then of the alcachofa that realized its greatest dream the army.)

i wonder if i am more receptive to, more stricken by, things that wheel by me if they happen to be orange. or red for that matter.

the other day on the bus reading an old issue of colors & i turned the page & there was, on a stark white background, a disembodied uterus + fallopian tubes. i looked around to see if any fellow passengers had caught it. sitting there looking strong & pathetic at once. it was slightly larger than life. maybe almost twice as large.

but only less than a week of looking at a living uterus, through reverberated sound waves on a greyscale screen. i think doing sonograms is the first Task I Have Done For a Living that calls up my training as an art historian. the ability to size up an image quickly in the dark & read the small bits that make it worthwhile. maybe this is why i studied arshile gorky & lee krasner instead of the italian renaissance.

so maybe Reading In The Dark isn't a truly marketable skill but what else have i got really. possibly breadbaking. or staying calm.

maybe it isn't calm at all. maybe it's me with my knuckles white, putting one foot in front of the other until i am out the door, or until i find myself suddenly surrounded by shelves, looking at the spines of books with titles like solar noise storms & ranger VIII photgraphs of the moon, with my fingers complexly tangled up in the rosary in my pocket.