Open Up and Bleed
𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖕𝖞 𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖊'𝖘 𝖉𝖆𝖞 𝖙𝖔 𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖉𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖉 𝖕𝖆𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖓𝖘
February 2022
Here in my tableau vivant we are stationary and silent. theatrically lit in my orange nissan micra we are posing like we might kiss. you are leaning across the handbrake and gearstick into me, the driver wishing she, me, were less circumspect more receptive to whatever you’re about to give. whatever i want is already too much like jouissance i am horny but suffering or more accurately horny for the suffering. truth is i find the word suffering to be totally drab and truth is i want you to lean into me a little more but you can’t, cause it’s a tableau vivant, and we are static. — Sophia Walsh
Sophia Walsh lives and works and writes in Naarm (Australia). @so00ophia (instagram)
A Wasp in Orange Juice (selections) by Natalie Lerner You wanted to die at home and I get it. Our house was perfect. I wake up in our house and walk into the kitchen where mom is waiting, taking my hand she leads me to the sink. He’s not actually dead, but he can’t be with us anymore. He’s across the street. Sometimes… if I stand here long enough I see him. So, I step closer to the sink, look out the window and wait for you. Sometimes I see the sliding glass door open from just over the fence. Several salt and pepper coils float just above each pointed post. Then the door closes and you’re gone. Other times I wait well into nightfall. I know that backyard, it is covered in pine needles just like at your best friend Allyn’s house. I listen to the sounds of them crunching beneath your Cowboy boots. . Your sisters are crowded together at the podium sharing stories about you, talking all at once and over each other. Their voices form a beautiful Grecian chorus, fresh from Wisconsin, pouring over with love and grief. . We both dreamed of you after the first night, you showed up with the dog you always wanted. . The hardest thing was when I couldn't smell you on your clothes anymore. . I have a letter from you that I don’t show to anyone and in it you tell me you are with me – in a passing bird – a saucer I place a cup on – the ocean, in all things – you’re there. I always feel you now, but not in things.
Natalie Lerner is an artist living and working in New York City. @natalie_lerner (instagram) / @natsbaked (twitter) / natalielerner.com
Two Rumors About a Cult by Jim Evans A Prostitute Sees An Orphan Steal He was going to have sex with her. He wanted to bring flowers. A bouquet seemed like too much of a gesture. He watched himself on camera twisting the head off of a rose. A person had seen it and they turned away, showing their black clogs, the dusty bottom of their leather bag, and muscle in their legs that was striking, possibly from malnutrition. The tallest residential building in the world, because of dew sucked through it on close days by equidistant rows of massive turbines—fraying the appearance—looked like an unfinished background painting. She would quiver when touched. His parents were dead. He once dreamt, wanting to give them what no one else had thought to give, of being an old man calling them mommy and daddy again; a reason he remembered this? To not speak it he would look out her bedroom window. The building would be there. A Psychic Gives Report to Her Husband A flower stand by a bus stop. A pink rip in the sky. It was dusk. She would have witnessed a car crash then had she not been practicing. On her forehead hands materialized, each cupping a lobe of skull. From the crown of her head a second pair of hands came to lay across the first, making a knuckle-y lattice. The face-covering portion of this hand-helmet was a gesture of concentration and unity: fingertips pressed flatly together below her upper lip, the thumbs beside her nostrils. And from her clavicle, hands that jutted out as if to catch what fell from her mouth. And from her clavicle to her shoulder: hands curled like the condemned at a prison’s walls. Her arms were ribbed by tightly-clasped hands, a team trying to pull down a sapling. Her chest was a chorus of praise-hands bracketing a loose maggot-pile of fingers all the way down to her waist. A headdress arrayed behind her hand-helmet was many prestidigitations, and finally two horns of supplication. She came to afterwards in the middle of the night, staring at a spider-webbed lightbulb outside her hotel door, at an hour quiet enough with a moth big enough to make a distinct sound when it bumped her. “I’m crazy—but I’m baller,” was all she had to tell him about it, and he nodded enthusiastically.
Jim Evans works in a bar in Los Angeles. @jehmbo (instagram)
Pet Bird by Samantha Carroll We went and bought a pet bird, A ring-necked dove. My boyfriend is always thinking of new ideas like this. He used to be a popstar Now he has many different hobbies. Before he made the purchase online, I asked him if he wanted another pet. He said well it isn’t really a pet that he will try his hardest to keep it alive, but it could die. We have a cat and a dog, too All of them together can make the house smell. Sometimes when my boyfriend cries Over a dead friend a movie or me I think it’s because of the stench.
Samantha Carroll is an actress from Long Island. @samantha____forever (instagram)
Simple Yearning by Emmeline Clein Dark room, purple pink lights, damp dress, well it’s really a slip, splashed by someone’s vodka soda, his camera pointed at me from across the bar –– was this it, after all that buildup? So, being briefly beautiful is a letdown, the camera pans away as soon as you get used to its glow. You know the drill: boys get bored, the black eyeball roves, muses multiply, get minimized, get married to the guy who’s got the glint in his eye, get uploaded to the cloud, get liked, get printed and framed, get bought, get divorced, get drunk. And maybe, finally, go home, get some sleep. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember Mischa Barton in 2003? Evenly tanned golden girl, spaghetti straps and that stretch of midriff, the curve of her backbone when she asked her OC love interest to zip her into her debutante dress –– now that was beauty, I thought then. Boys got in physical fights just to stand in her line of sight, invented fake identities to inspire her empathy, and in the end, drove cars off the road to keep her from leaving them. Less a letdown, more a murderous miracle, her character’s beauty kept her high on the fumes of being beloved until it killed her. Still, startlingly, what I felt as I looked at her dead body was simple yearning, smoggy, vision-blurring jealousy. Smoke rose from the overturned car, the boy she loved emerged from flames, carrying her splayed silhouette pieta style, and then she died for all those boys’ sins, for all the girls like me sweating envy even as we cried and the credits played. Even back then, I knew beauty could break the body. I just thought it was worth it, as I threw away my lunch at school and tried to make myself throw up after dinner. There used to be a facebook application called ‘honesty box’ that allowed people to send you anonymous messages. Pandora as e-girl wasn’t the first to tell me I wasn’t beautiful, but she was more thorough than the averted glances or the wisps of insults murmured just loud enough, the laughter I could lie to myself about. So I’d refresh the feed and not feed myself, per my tutors on tumblr under #thinspiration, where Mischa’s corpse was currency. God it hurts to want a feeling you’ve never felt. An alcoholic writer titled her memoir Drinking: A Love Story. She said white wine embraced her from the organs out, spread a you’ve finally made it home feeling from limb to limb, set a smile on her lips. All the screens I stared at and spilled my secrets into told love stories about teenagers who found their soulmates young, girls who converted womanizing bad boys to love-struck princes, stories that promised a love like an opioid habit with no side effects, a perma-high that didn’t cloud your judgment. The girls in these stories were gorgeous, needless to say, and sometimes their sidekicks weren’t quite, and simply, I was scared of ending up the girl off to the side, supportive and sweet, but silly and snickered at. All this alliteration, I’m always trying too hard, I’m told –– are you rolling your eyes? A few moments that made my breath catch, hope-high. His hand on my thigh in the shallow end, champagne in my brain. Her eyes lighting up on the light up dance floor, her mouth on mine in the bathroom, her morning dream exhales on my hand. The way she looked at me in the back of the cab, the way he did in the middle of the night, the darkness cut with rainbow lights. The way they listened to me speak, like I was a fortune teller who’d been right before. But I was bluffing.
Emmeline Clein is a writer working on a book about body fascism, disordered eating, and girlhood. @emmelclein (twitter)
The Midwest, When She’s in Manhattan Today was her turn to waste her money. Over the phone, we talk of movie scenes, women alone buying hats. Over the phone it's always different. I wish I could’ve been there, I say, to pick out your Dalmatian hat. We’d have said the same things, or maybe less, she says. We’d have said more than we are right now. — David Astrofsky
David Astrofsky is a writer from Massachusetts.
on reading the signs by Leah Monsour recently i developed a crush on a salmon fisherman after engaging in a very short but memorable conversation. i knew very little about him. the very little i knew, i had caught through two screenings with his films, both about fishing, and through instagram, where he comically posted 99% fish content. so yeah, most of what i knew was fish. but the crush was strong and so fish i saw. and i mean it. suddenly, fish were everywhere. fish symbols on everything, fish being offered to me, conversations about fish happening as i walked into rooms, paid work documenting a painting with fish in it, an album with “fishman” in the title playing at a tattoo appointment...it was often enough to feel overwhelming and even annoying. at the time, i assumed that this meant i needed to swim to him, although in reality all my efforts to do so fell short. the day he was going to visit me at the farmers market, the guy at the fish booth offered me salmon. by the time i went to collect, it was sold out, and he never showed. he didn’t come to my halloween party. we didn’t match on tinder. quickly it became clear that we were swimming in different channels. the currents i thought i’d picked up on weren’t strong enough. then, the psychic told me that i hadn’t met my soulmate yet, and she had been right about everything else... regardless i kept seeing fish, and so began a new search for meaning. given my hyperfocus and the tight grip needed to hang on to a slippery fish, i had been missing something: the reality of my romantic situation at the time. i was entangled with someone who i knew to be very monogamous, and it was evolving slowly and cautiously. it was comfortable, easy. he was kind. stable. an artist. let’s call him boy (B). the night the crush was sparked, i invited B to join me at the party, but he was asleep. then, i had my lightning strike connection. as is true in the course of many failed relationships, the missing pieces were served to me on a new-man-shaped platter, this time with a side of fish. what had been missing with B was a certain excitement. i had a taste of it that night and i didn’t look back. the current had taken me. i received a kind message from B the next morning, but i was already strategizing ways to catch my new crush. fast forward down the stream a bit. i grew more and more certain of the need to set him free. the ick rarely evaporates. my pining for the fisherman had waned, i had seen the psychic, and my focus shifted again from dream world to reality. but i was still seeing fish. on a weeknight i met up with B and his friend with the intention of breaking things off, but the conversation took a different turn. he told me he wanted to see more of me. he wanted to go to the Met like we had talked about months prior. what day was good for me? i had been drinking and he was sweet. i thought, i should give him another shot before i let him off the hook. i invited him to stay at mine with a twinge of uncertainty. plus i had a yeast infection: a safety net, and a sign from the benevolent universe. so there i found myself, late at night, in the kitchen fetching some water. there i found myself, turning to him as he entered the room in his boxers. there i found myself, water in hand, glancing down at said boxers. and there the boxers found themselves, covered in a pattern. a pattern of none other than: fish. the boxers stayed on that night and the next morning. it was too weird. i ended things a couple days later. and after this, the fish slowed. i never went on a date with the fisherman and i never really tried. maybe reading the signs is about tapping into both the dream world and reality. two points of contact. if i had done that from the start, maybe i would have known what the fish were there to tell me: just keep swimming. there are, in fact, other fish in the sea.
Leah Monsour is a time based media maker living in in Ridgewood, Queens. @its_leah__baby___ (instagram) / @rlyniceguyirl (twitter)
Lucy Loves me by Giovanna Zavala Just watched this documentary about Lucille Ball. It was pretty good. They use the word beautiful about a thousand times. Desi goes up on stage after a taping and says that he and Lucy hate communists, because that’s how she was registered and everyone was worried the show would be canceled. Lucy says, “No matter how I get dressed up, I always look like a cigarette girl,” which is like when Tyra says that someone is high fashion rather than commercial, which she only ever says to the skinny girls. I think cigarette girls are like commercial lol. I can’t believe you grew up without TV, haha. Can you believe more people have seen Lucille Ball’s face than any other human being ever? It was in the documentary, that fact. It was sad when they got divorced. I tossed the magnet that had her face on it when I moved. You sent it in the mail when you visited New York. Haha. I live here now. Can you believe it? More people than any human being ever? Isn’t that wild? We don’t even talk anymore.
Giovanna Zavala is an artist and she lives in New York City. @lady.roku (instagram) / @GiovannaZavala (twitter)
A Simple Encounter by Maddie Gwinn Sweet cheer, that’s what he called custard. I can still hear it in his cute Serbian accent. He wrote it once in a message that I read over and over in that voice. So there I was today back in his neighborhood. I could see his looming apartment building through the trees of the cemetery. I decided against going to the strudel stand he took me to once, to save the time and nostalgic memory preserved in amber. I still wanted a custard strudel, so I got one at the Pekarna next to the tram stop. A long line, I repeated the order in Czech to myself and managed to say it correctly. Crossing the street, picking chunks of apple cinnamon sugar with my fingers, I remembered how childish I felt next to him. He had bought me a strudel to cheer me up, and also one for Masha, to smooth things over after she saw us walking together. That was three years ago, and it happened like this: we were deep in conversation walking through Vaclavske Namesti, when I thought I saw him flash a wave at someone. Then his phone started ringing, which he ignored. He said we had just walked right past his girlfriend. Now, here again, alone, I feel nothing when I see her. It’s completely normal, as if she’d always been standing across from me at the stop. I’d know her from anywhere. Yet, this was the first time I’d actually seen her in person. How small she is. Like a tiny doll. Long black evening coat meant for the opera, a tiny purse that she practically holds with one finger, and a hand woven shopping bag. She coughs politely into her wrist. She is made out of porcelain. I am not at all surprised. She doesn’t see me. I look away, almost bored. What’s the use of analyzing it? I’ve seen everything in one glance: she’s an excuse. When I look back up, she's stepping quietly on the tram that rolls in front of her, turning away from me. The whole event occurs in silence, like a breeze. She was always there, and when I acknowledged her she was gone. Like the double slit test. A quantum moment. I wonder where she’s going. Out East, past Flora, there is nothing. Some aimless job I imagine, I secretly hope. I don’t care anymore. I knew it would happen, I expected it, and in what way better than this? It was meant to get me thinking. I always knew he was boring like her. If it had been him on the street instead of Masha, I would've folded into a fit of laughter. He is the kind of person I detest; wasting his parents' money, living in the ugly new high rises of Prague, calls himself a writer. He doesn’t know the first thing about love. Come to think of it, I never knew much about him and he never cared to know me. He thought he knew me. But it wasn’t all a waste. There was a time when I needed him. I’m allowed to wonder what would have happened if he had released me. We both tried, though he was never really mine to keep.
Maddie Gwinn is a filmmaker from Seattle. @maddiegwinn (instagram)
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