Sugar Cane

At that hour, at that age, you were looking at the firmament of the sea, at that threshold of paradise of shivering and rags, at Eve in her aquarium. You turn back to your sisters, legs apart. Silence. Memory is no longer a tender poppy. toxic fumes and damp light in dirty whitewashed rooms. Go down to the harbor, go forever, ignoring time and space. End your purple morning among driftwood, polished glass, market debris. Keep walking, and not a word of despair. Doubtful rainbow follows the vagaries of the tides, pregnant, heavy. Monsoon clouds.

You remembered the drowned ones that Alice liked to imagine in that shaking grave. You saw yourself as Ophelia gliding through the oil that colored the sea. And what would you substitute for those long purple flowers that the young girl put on her forehead before going to the stream, those long purple flowers that the maidens call the fingers of the dead and which the silent shepherds describe? You saw yourself, your hair sticky with the purple mollusks that simple wives sell with a slight wink to travelers wondering for what sensual stupefaction these obscene fruits of the sea were plucked from the rocks.

A woman crowned with natural straw must renounce the blue of tenderness, the red desire, the blue of joy, and even the weary mauve. The casks on the shore slowly lose their perfume, bleeding into the insensitive land; after the cries, the warm blood and the gnashing of teeth there comes a great silence. The wharf carries this carnal soil into the sea, this fractured body of a continent which the sunstroke has sanctified. ⁣


Sugar Cane
August 2019
at Locust Plains Exports
\ w/ 1000Morceaux, Juan Ojeda, Polyhedron, and Optimal Density⁣
storyline, curated, directed: underground flower
text: persephone
photo: nikita dedel, juan ojeda, leif pan, vera petryaeva
thanks to leif pan for install assistance and printing out images