it is like being in church, in worship, head thrown back and fingers interlocked, knees on dirt and scraped and blushing red, and then at the same time it feels like agony, like a grazing of coin against rows of ribs. it is describable only through the most abstract of things, in words that do not make much sense and in songs that are neither sad nor festive. it feels like lux lisbon and the woman from angela carter's black venus whose name i forgot. it feels like the cracking of a tooth and tastes like lemonade. it's in laces, candles, and rosary beads, in outspread palms and polaroid photos of cakes and children. it is in the faces of mary magdalene and cleopatra, then it is woman and then it is not. sometimes it feels like a trapped starling in the columns of my bones, tangled there in the nerves, struggling to make it to petras, greece where its brood perches with a crying mother. it is nameless, formless, like the exhalations of a spirit. venomous, too, and it is bellowing and silent at once. it is not my rage, not my grief. it identifies as my longing but i cannot be deceived. i know my longing all too well and this is not that. what is your name? what is your name? what do i call what has nothing to be called?
