Archival Tendencies

Anna Walsh
Surface Tension or, She Has Built A World For You to Live In
Opening times
(i)
A horse
both
dislocated and true
an abstraction in
the eyes
of the one selling
and buying it. Sleek like
metal like
silver,
broken in now but not malleable.
If you were trying to make me feel small you did it
+ it’s such a relief not
to be tall for once,
to be governed by something
uninterested in me by
nature of its design.
A one long fish, pink oily and albumen nipples
an ocean churning in a pearl and
my insides blurring – eyes
a wet gel and nerves
all for pleasure. This is the world
and it has been made for you to live in, you,
you lashed fish, you
beautiful slip
If you would let me reach out and touch the tip
What life could look like if we let it!
Instead, wild and relatable claims like
the body has become the site to know the world
maximalism cannot be contained
to lie flat on the ground just rubbing dirt is
very sexy
(ii)
And the locket, she
puts me in the mind
of secrets, of
ballistic worlds for teenage girls (one experience however damaged
I would never undo because of the secrets and lies the
caustic breakage, the feathers pink in the ears)
and the mythic status of what can happen in a country, wickedly I
came out wrong
slipped like grease towards badness
skidded in wanting
to go deeper underground.
Behaving in a way that really
looked like begging someone to hit me over the head.
The difference between asking and begging for it,
I have known only via the tempers
and willingness of a warm sometimes wicked body.
(iii)
This tall and beautiful
girl-thing, riding on a metal horse, she knows where
the secrets are buried
and how the ones who keep them got there.
I am learning how to write
and speak
(+ pronouncing my t’s)
and the flamed blonde head of a babe tends the heat of my life. She lies down low on the ground with me and gives me flowers, she is telling me she is a great pink god and we must all be quiet for now.
Call me, don’t call me: the line is static! The world is going to make me insane!
(iv)
Something should be said too about weeping, about bleeding
(not essential; consequential)
the slurp and the sick, bumping valleys glooping red
noses, it takes so much exertion
to lay something to rest. The work
the heavy sludge drown work, the
tight jerk to
/
pull internal pursestrings
the control you must learn to survive +
the unrelentingness of going on,
going on cleaning/spitting/shining/fucking/cleaning/boiling/cleaning/cleaning/making
safe a domicile from scraps
+
after all that, then, the
daily havoc of choice, of choosing
to decide then cutting to prepare
then cooking to plant then
listening to listen then listening
to say, to touch then say, repeat then after, ‘I will use the hooves
and the fat to make a centrepiece,
and I will put you in it.’
Sneaking a mirror
to check the surface for lines,
for evidence + proof + future vision:
to know what I should do when
the time comes. But one thing I
know now, and by god I tell you,
(v)
my work will never be done.
You cannot expect people to keep living the way they do.
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