Oh, Body of Velvet @ Dirty Solutions Dry Run

I was very grateful for the chance to read “Oh, Body of Velvet: a series of increasingly coarse fragments from a memoir and research proposal” for Dirty Solutions at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

This was a once-off, material reading of excerpts around motherhood, creativity, failure, art and writing.

Morning: slip of blue-orange light that signals dawn and out there, in the woodland, a buck kneels and my own haunch quivers, here—in the dawn- struck bed with my small child beside me and I have cast us both in red, in hormones and iron, images and clauses, all of it red because red is red and—something about the moon, some lunar quality accounting for the pigment. 

Morning, and I think, I’ve made a stain on these laundered sheets. 

But—this blue-orange light. 

But—my child, his uninterrupted dream and the fine latticework of his flushed cheek which turns now—small, hot planet—toward me—

But why has the buck knelt?

Same reason any creature gets down on its knees: to better bear the brunt of the great swift change that is coming.