say a body

By | 1 November 2018

fingerbirds
mosskin
sneck
pours
knoes
meat
fleet
 
and a gyre
                                                                        centrifugal
 
            more than eleven orifices
 
            more than one oh!
 
            more than one i
 
            more than one—

fattongue
phantomlimbs
torturemouth
shimmerbody
offwithher
stutterheart
everytthingontheoutside
 
swan’sneck floating backward, unhinge the jawbeak
throat at capacity
all thrumming air stretched
 
say a body
 
just say
 
with the mouth?
 
say a body with the mouth?
 
what is mouth, is no saying, falling out of language?
 
the mouth that cannot speak
ends the world
 
the mouth is not made for speaking everything
is not made for birthing the body
in toxic saliva pools
from the river to the
 
worlds end if not said by a mouth saying a body saying the world using words in order building a body with hands connected to arms that are not birds or even the thought of birds that cannot fly without the saying of flying riding on the thrumming breath through a flailing neck and no throat architecture even imagined no arcs no naves no flesh folds closing no plosives meaning something harsh or soft 25 verterbrae cannot say a body exists and the worlds end with unspeaking breath going back in all the stars unshining the earthbody a platter a hole a dream all the darkness alive and dense unspeakable
 
it shimmers, the unsaying end,
 
it shimmer-shimmers

 


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Virginia Barratt is a writer, researcher + interdisciplinary artist. She is a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University. Her research interests are panic, affect, linguistics and deterritorialisation. As co-founder of cyberfeminist collective vns matrix, she co-created works which critiqued gender and new technologies in an emerging cyber culture. She is deeply invested in collaborative practices as a critique of authorship and ownership, of the relentless production of the unique and as a way to create in-crisis with others. She has recently been published in Artlink Magazine, Plinth Journal, Offshoot Anthology of lifewriting, writing from below and has performed, spoken and exhibited at Ars Electronics in Austria, format systems in Adelaide, Vierte Welt and Humbolt university in Germany, Sorbonne and performing arts forum in France, and with vns matrix at new museum in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria, Artspace and Sydney College of the Arts.

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