After the End of the End of the World
In 2020 Rachel Epp Buller and I conducted a year-long collaborative project: each month we plucked passages from whatever books we were reading and sent those words to each other, incorporating them into individual projects. These works were later exhibited in a two-person show curated by Rachel at the Regier Art Gallery at Bethel College. You can see the full results of this collaboration and read about the show here. (At the end of this article there’s a listing of the different authors whose words we reappropriated.) Among my contributions to this project were a series of small “chapbooks” of poetry using vintage make-up cases and an old scrapbook, sometimes referred to at the time as a “gluebook,” several of which are below.
“Top Ten Beauty Secrets”
your hands will grasp the nearest things
you are sort of floating up
murmur to any real angel
to sing its thin and pungent song
you'll create an emptiness
that none can own
this is part of your ghost
your steps an unknown language
those voices outside yourself
disrupting all your procedures
your left hand trembles a little these days
grief will never be finished with you
you will walk through puddles of ink
you will disappear for seven years
you are but a momentary blip
with a taste for wayward hobbies
you do not require an audience
you are fossilized in amber
you'll have been gone a long time
you won't live long enough to forget
“The Ephemeral Materiality of the In-Between”
veils of negative existence
will kill you in your dreams
this strange malaise
a moment of no turning back
the bird's erotic life
flames that catch and grow
roads washed out of existence
graveyards of the ancient kind
we're heading toward the storm
to bite some people that we know
another earth shatters
good-bye to the owl
something marvelous happening underground
made by badgers
a slush of vague intention
as inhuman as the human itself
a beauty of startling queerness
woven into spider webs
every cell bone and organ
the faint blind stirrings
our ghostly company
cares nothing for the fashions
every bird fish and mammal
erodes to stardust
the darkness takes us
dislodging the eggs
“Six Duets”
wallpaper
goblins
*
fungi
liberation
*
luxurious
rabbits
*
mercurial
stardust
*
ridiculous
murderer
*
ephemeral
wolves
