There Is a Devil Inside Me

Carolina Ebeid

           —After Ana Mendieta
 
Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold
forest-fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate,
shimmer, gleam lucero-light? Through the morning
 
would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off—
& by night would you read by the light of your own torso?
 
Did you hear through the curtains a voice, through folds &
folds of fabric a lowdown voice—How are you fallen
from—How are you cut down to the ground?

                                                *

Would gunpowder flash up in the other hand?
Were you the most beautiful of them—the most beauty,
full bew, teful, bu wtie, full be out, i full, btfl?
 
Did the sky flutter & flower like bridal
shrouds? Did a dog rise in the East in it?
Did a wolf set in the West? Were they a thirsty pair?
 
And was there a meadow? How many flowers to pick?
And when no flowers, were you gathering bone chips
& feathers & mud? Was music a circle that spun?
 
                                                *

Did you spin it in reverse? Was your singing a rushlight,
pyre light, a conflagration of dragonflies rushing out
from your fire-throat? Did you lie down in the snow?
 
Did it soften & thaw into a pool of your shape? 
Did you whisper to the graven thing, whisper a many
 
lowdown phrase: How are you fallen              	my btfl? 
 
Would they trek closer, the animals? A grand iridium
thirst, each arriving with their soft velour
mouths to drink your silhouette?

One sentence held the echoes of a room without furniture. One narrowed like a corridor leading from the outside in. One sentence grew out of fashion with the disco-ball maker. One was radial & wheeling, & the verb spun at the center. One forecasted an avalanche. One melted on the sand. One widened its plot for the burying of corpses. This one came zoo-tamed eating with other nocturnals. This one came caged like a hotel fire alarm. This one was a wound. This one a stitch. This a cicatrix.

chatter around town will be of blindness all ghosts will be Russian ghosts at parties always the law here is to sing, believe me no thought-bubble tarries above your head for all the brethren to read, they’re streaming a film on the history of the sun since eyes evolved to see underwater do you prefer photos of landscapes or photos of people, you choose the figure for god among the lavish descriptions of polar deserts, information clouds known as the neobeautiful, watching four-minute videos on how to draw blood samples with a butterfly needle you will all have gone ancestral by then say unto them that you were changed into a heliotropic plant then back to a woman then a plant again, unlucky women carry too much yellow bile what paleozoic sunlight was like acknowledge soul begins in the liver take the vexing thought to the anagram machine: net worth metamorphoses into a wet thorn, tell me what my “about” shall be there’s a cherry tree at the center of puberty, a chlorine hand wash before entering love’s written all over your face, my love what incredible footage has emerged

The scroll is a shape that keeps returning. It’s old and circular. It contains a vertical nature (this is why we use the electronic verb to scroll, which is how you may be reading this). The scroll corresponds to the hermeneutical act of reading and writing. In the legend of Saint Romanos the Melodious, we are told his voice is like hearing metal scraping upon metal. He is visited by the Virgin Mary in a dream. She offers a scroll for him to swallow. When he wakes, he wakes with a mellifluous song-voice and a genius for composing music of praise and lament. carried away carry a tune Bed space —> Dream space —> The involuted surface of the parchment she hands him —> The choral hymn inside —> The white musical space for an intake of breath —> Before that blank was parchment was animal skin —> Epidermic space of that blank —> The younger the babe the more transparent the skin, the smoother, the more exquisite —> Bay of gravid cattle, of kine, the kindred ovine —> In utero space after space after space —> The width of the palm, kind palm to harvest the calf after calf after calf —> Skin so translucent so light-sent —> So light, sheets made of meat for the beautiful-letter —>

You put a bag around your head and walked into the river. You walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were never dead game on the banks of your mental styx for the double audience of smoke— — You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water. You stepped across the water with a hand on his arm and he was silent and kind as you shoved off, toward the smoky coils of the greek-seeming dead— You’d been trying to sleep. Found yourself here in the mythocryptic land— The river — had widened to a lake. You were anchored in the shallow boat by his faceless weight— And on the green shore you could see their vapored residue, how they could smell it, those two―if you slit your wrist you could make them speak. If you — slit your wrist you might be able to sleep. Grief. Grief. Handing you back your coin.

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There Is a Devil Inside Me

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There Is a Devil Inside Me

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