Welcome to Little Prayers, the self-destructing gallery. Here for a good time not a long time.
This week, our islands, our exile.
Ghostwatch (1992) - All the better to eat you with.
infant dead blown our slates
harvested with acute accent
I watched Ghostwatch on D-Day, found
the Great British landing
levitating - closedoored -
on sound, without eyes, (old
norse: auga, vindr-auga,
windows.) The skein is thin
Over our dream, the deep-rooted
Organ played by hand, foot,
Enclosure: me casa es to casa (from
-Kat, meaning to weave.) Look,
We know which stairs play
Which notes, and who's
Up at witching hour with
Owls by the sound of their
Step. Listen, there's the snail
Foundations. Ganesa
Gastropod, a many-tailed boy kisses
The mud, drain lip bit and too
wet, creak-pipe moiré, channels of
God-blood trail not far beneath us.
A very leaky country indeed... poly-,
g
unthreshed blot
of mould, carpet peeled: blóts
harkened by zephyr-ways, stone black
forests - cracks, the rats all hallowed
And the bats roosting June, the cats
Fighting for sleepless beaches of time
In a great Pan clang. Yowling (from low),
They (from ǵhau,
To call) hammer light on
A dormouse at dawn, listening to lands
Lined by Fee, Fi, Fo & Fum, with two big
Eyes for the outside to come.
- Written by Caleb Carter
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt - Signs Fiction
In the crackle and hiss of wires, Samuel Morse sent the first telegram message: "What hath God wrought?" a question sparked in the static of a cold night, the beauty of which since found in words unsaid, carried only to those receptive-mouthed and lulling.
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- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Celine Sciamma - Panta Rei
The caprice of fire's medium blossoms like a rose from its intent to unshroud the surface. Beneath its kiss, change blushes with eminence.
In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Celine Sciamma constructs an Orphic idyll for a redeemed gaze, from which men are exiled and the director presides benevolently, warmly, over the canonical scribe of woman's love - a rebirth spiting the presence of death - with home-alone giddiness. It is this inner freneticism unhampered by accumulative (male) systems that engenders the radicality and depth of its heat, amputated embraces are transplanted with communion in the Dionysian scale (music, synapses, passion) via the gates of Averno. In the hearts of each woman so regularly beneath the durance of a linen pall (shaped itself like a frozen fire), these flames also become like rosariums, chancy, tidal, rueful and true. From within, ancient shapes can be touched and, in heat, made new as soon as they are touched.
Somehow this paradox duels consistently, perhaps indefinitely fractals: the shroud being a frozen fire and the fire that burns the shroud, a waltz between gulf and engulf in which one feels held despite being at the bottom of the well; in which rapture means to be aflame, in freefall, but enraptured means finally to be caught.
- Written by Caleb Carter
Gregory Ferrand - Oh What a World!
It is the hottest and longest day of the year tomorrow, and also your birthday. But on your planet it's the coldest. And shortest. I like that you get less joy on your birthday than everyone else in the universe. I shouldn't like that, but I think of it every time I feel the stale ache in my knee. Do you remember why? From your planet you must've seen us making feasts of crumbs, despite sometimes unable to tell apart ash from ember, we sifted through looking for traces that you were watching at all. What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel? Did you at all? Could you?
I heard the snap of my skin against concrete, saw the sting of bone breaking flesh, felt the scar of tears rolling down sunburnt cheeks. If you saw it, then you fooled me. Me, the fool. Crying on the curb, wheels still spinning, too mortal to take it and my gaze aimed up looking for not what had left but maybe what was never there. Is that too flowery for you? Too faggoty? The only poems you wrote were slurred into Saturday night dinners rhyming beer-breath with 'life-lessons' that sounded more like your own regrets cooling in air-conditioned air. Words that hung for a second like smoke from a barrel, inhaled and buried deep within that heavy chest of yours again. What did you teach me? You taught me to tell time, to tie my shoelaces, to ride a bike, to count to one hundred, even as I got older to change a tyre or catch a fish with my bare hands, but you never taught me where to look for God, and you never taught me that when you cum all the heat leaves your body in the hot sperm, and it leaves you shivering, shivering like when you're fighting tears, shivering with the pain of a broken knee, shivering when you're running up stairs scared, shivering like you on your cold, short birthday.
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Walter Sickert - A Night of Pleasure, 1906
Dear Degas, From Hell
my old master
let's go out out, you say a dark night is a night anywhere, nah, I've just the thing, bring me my arrows of desire, the honey-cups, the clear tulips teasingly retuned, we'll be looked at wrong once and I'll break them into stars on the back of a soft head, I don't hate them, um-but, words don't stumble, they stem, he said what he said and he meant it, and we didn't arch these vaulted nights by fault, Degas, you don't tulle time, you bleed it, and for that you need a knife, or at least something once flat and once whole and now broken, I swear we're bipolar, when we cry we vomit the mauve of reproach, I've inherited the muck now where's the brass, show me tackleshops, the gums of the wyrm, I'll show you the necrotic incisor, excalibur, let's light up, my eyes are huge, see attached - there's a man there at the end of the hall, no? I see the lord of the manor with a red sash, a night bleeding lights from the melting snow
- Written by Caleb Carter
