Excerpt from “The Corpse at Stake Was a Dream We Felt Inside Of”

That we arrived was not an explanation. 

Not even through erogenous terms. 

To the question that bore a horizontal appearance but no scent or other indication or contraindication of the consequences inherited from feeling this way. 

Feeling (inside) exuberant. Invaginated. Turned around by the same hands (inside) again. 

We wanted to know what it meant to be constituted through the particular exclusion of every other yield.
Or open pit. 

Yes. We came when called to beauty.

Then asked who were we while looking into the eyes of our interior stranger. The teary face that neither came nor went yet appeared at the edge we held onto.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress


[That the territory is shared extends thresholds of presence.
What exposes the image disorients the horizon while remaining perfectly at ease.]

That question was impassable. It was always and never good-bye. Today and today without distinction, though our horizon formed a warming edge. 

If the history had been shared, that wasn’t what we held onto in the dream of a tender relation. Our consistent study in getting truly fucked up. 

In histories of coordinates. Of canyons. Mornings positioned by late saguaro blooms. 

We watched the places our bodies touched, and in touching proliferated terms. We spatialized consciousness. 

Fucked to our core we said always and never, but we couldn’t invest in either as a strategy for love, or territory to pasture our incessantly weeping beasts.

More than time and context, the question required consistent care. Tongues to soothe raw flesh. Fingering of entanglements. 

The organic disruption of order structures nothingness, a concentrated beast each body moves through that won’t stop for shit. 

Not war or the weight of water. The development of cavities. The desire we were destined to live outside of. 

Not land as a metaphor.

Not the minstrel sign announcing a town we’d otherwise forget. 

The metaphor would in every instance break down. Often sobbing. Tongues abandoned their thresholds for the physical development of clarity.

We carried all of this without a shred of clarity yet felt it to our bones.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress


[And it would seem in order to arrive. Entirely emerge. And just as the rains encompass. Bearing gentle definition. The most obvious course.]

This is what you need to know. 

The organic disruption of order is a concentrated beast. 

In the dream we gorged. Were milked. The consequences weren’t immediately visible.

Turned out by it. We said, gently now.

Credit

The Corpse at Stake Was a Dream We Felt Inside Of was originally published in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, 2024, edited by Dan Leers, Hillman Photography Initiative, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.