Nisha Ramayya
Villein Regardant
The villain is one who rents space outside her body, inside a forest. She can barely tell the difference between the big inside and outside of the forest and reality, and the small insides and outsides of the forest’s realities, but the forest assures her that the difference is there to protect her.
Trained to believe that she has a manifest destiny to rent, a duty not to own, she sits and works on the inside in order to sit and work at all.
Inside the forest is a ghost town; the space is populated by voices without culpability, violent imagery without hermeneutic limits. One who is paid to set limits inside the seminar room that she knows to be unreal.
Imagine an ivory tower without windows, a forest without breaks in its canopy. Imagine the manifestations of dying and death at the centre, the reproduction of ghosts necessary to protect the establishment of the ghost town.
Imagine the lights that come to light at this kind of centre, where ideas may be grasped by the hands. The forest is infested with these kinds of lights, trained upon ideas that must make exhibitions of themselves, that must be handled by customs to be grasped.
Shoulders back, she walks into the opening between manifesto and manifest, to demonstrate her point about point’s void. She knows not to look back over the shoulder as she walks, for people might make an example of her, and it is she who must disappear.
For example, one who looks back over the shoulder when walking in and out of doors, and disappears, when walking up and down stairs, and disappears, when walking in and out of rooms, and disappears, when walking up and down corridors, and disappears.
Whispers are bound to the institution. Everyone knows which doors to stay away from; not everyone knows. Didn’t anyone tell you not to walk up and down those stairs; no one told me. Everyone knows which rooms to avoid; not everyone knows. Didn’t anyone warn you about those corridors; no one warned me. Whisperers bear the marks of their disclosures.
We are the ones who must share these warnings. Step into the negative spaces between circles, the breaks between cliques. Rub up against becoming networks in these kinds of breaks, agitate for spaces as breaks.
Renounce the kind of protection afforded by the forest, the rationale of duty, the kind of safety afforded by ghosts, the duty of rationale.
Imagine boundless pleasures. Imagine break without point.
Nisha Ramayya's poetry pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences (2016) are published by Oystercatcher Press. With Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, she co-authored Threads (2018), a creative-critical pamphlet published by clinic
. She is a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group and the interdisciplinary practice-based-research group Generative Constraints.
Rebecca Tamás
Antigone / In / Water
I get stranger every minute
small apple in my hand a flush grenade
death water under my nails
death water on my hands
splashing around in the shadows
my brother’s head is tight and cold
lying there on his throne of his body
he now understands how tiny the distance is
between muscle and light
I can’t describe to you
taking his wet corpse
and pressing it into the earth
the hot thick joy
the dwarf star exploding
the pink milk tirade
the vines threshing out between cracks
he goes down
lip on blue mud
smudged descending eye
soil on black organs his semi-precious jewels
that had begun to stink
his polaroids are burned
his explicit messages
his crinkly shuffling
only his weight lands on the shore
only his bones/his sung sound
*
in the thick pasta-water light
of early morning
I am being observed
I am seen
holding revenants close
in a low-cut silk gown
I am seen
sticky with mud and unmourning
I am seen
placing flowers in tall purple vases
I am seen
running greasy hands through my hair
I am seen
unwrapping delicate almond biscuits
I am seen
running a tortoiseshell comb up my wet thighs
I am seen
walking the city’s walls in clementine-orange socks
I am seen
pouring champagne into graves
I am seen
licking bright blood like a cow on salt
I am seen
hanging green lace underwear on the perimeter
but you know what?
that is OK
I am not scary and
I am not scared
*
do you think that
love goes all the way in straight lines?
that it is your fiancée?
your needy bridge partner?
your cat?
I loved both
my brothers but not much
still
no one else has memorised their bad poems
no one else has heard them ordering pizza in their sleep
telling each other the shape of a horse’s spine
snuffling in blind darkness
crying after an unexpected slap
cleaning their shoes in the sink
love is not a good or bad feeling
it is after vomiting and vomiting
feeling deliciously empty
it is cooling lemon juice in the bed of your stomach
sitting on the edge of the sofa wrapped in a towel
spitting food out of your mouth for wheedling birds
love does not start a riot that calls up obvious and divided crowds
but photosynthesises helplessly in yellow light
fat desperate and grateful
tall bloodless and sudden
love has marked out a side to sleep
has slipped unfussed
from advertisements and bungalows
fat blooms fussing the air
into dark pools of earth
into revenge as quiet and reverent as ice
into the unavoidable unremitting grace of the sea
the grace leaks into me is mine
as right as spring when things hurl up entirely silent
as right as water over stones pressing down to smooth forms
as right as looking up at the peak and doing nothing
going nowhere hands under your thighs
watching sitting obsequious to the light’s commands
obedient to them letting the light come in its victory
run over by the leaden tractor of the light
Rebecca Tamás is currently based in York, where she works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. She is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century,
published by Ignota Books. Her first collection of poetry, WITCH
, will be out from Penned in the Margins on the 20th of March 2019.