CATHERINE CHEN
https://ENTER.com
Productivity by another name is the automation of authenticity: will you trust her to respond with accuracy? I’m digressing. A drowning. Begrudged by linear circuitry, misplaced modifiers. The unnecessary flash of an ellipse. Ampersand as personality: the rise & fall of Georges Bataille’s neurotic cat // anti-colonial praxis: Hussein Chalayan two-in-one looks. Asked for the weather, she replies in earnest, “I don’t know that song.” The magnitude of an answer, reduced to figures lost in translation. Natural language processes what could be undermined and yet still remain actionable. Much like much, actionable is one of those words that doesn’t seem real when I consider its etymology. Tasting every sumptuous word in our mouth. Spitting out: textures. Swishing around, capturing hints of mint, lemon, and ricotta. Notes of a deranged maniac or a hysterical woman. In this way I am working on the world’s first English-to-Machine Dictionary. When I told you what I intended to accomplish over the course of our stay in Amsterdam, you laughed. I may have joined in. I was reading essays about the loss of archival memory in the cloud and the places where art can belong and the uses of poetry and I had deeply fanciful ideas about the role of technology in art. Isn’t that still true: I’m processing the blow of having lost myself in the vision of someone else’s ideal woman. I’m processing my body for a crimson cage, Kate Upton’s winsome body, a Caravaggio print, sestina, Homeric epics, two goats and a head of cabbage, fluorescent streetlights, sport, seven minutes of underwater breathing, old times’ sake, pleasure, blood, loud nasal breathing, wholesome modes of play, for the world against the world in spite of the world towards the world with the world.
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There Is No Body of a Poem
Other disasters enter the nave of biology. A forgiving body.
Forgive me for intruding. On today of all days. She is no longer
here. Her scent lingers, like a hum. Flipping the page, I feel
smothered / swept into the Trisuli River. As if the world is about to
end or place me on eternal hold, I read survivor accounts of state
violence and I’m reading so quickly the names and crimes and
protests blur together in the primordial soup of nostalgia. Primordial
soup: two bay leaves, star anise, and green peppercorn. Nostalgia: a
reference term used in the aftermath of government-sponsored
revisionist history. The word as my text. My word is nothing without
the official seal of the puppet governor an official-elect of the rebels
who once decried democratic crimes against humanity. I’m vague.
I’m gushing. But I’m talking about us. We didn’t have a choice of how
to desire survival. We were hardly a war. We war. There was
always a war. I stopped reading, ears perked up at the smooth
cadence of a leaky bathroom faucet. Instead of burying my head
in archival peat (e.g. my grandmother’s garden), I touch the engraved
names of known relatives who are honored at the memorial. This was
during a time when action was preferable to silence.
At the far end of the building, the white artist whose work expropriates
Indigenous iconography asks why I am ashamed of my ancestry. Who
are you grieving? How do I answer under these conditions? I spread the mat
beneath the studio space, lying stomach down. Mouth ajar in the hopes
of catching rainwater. I guess if I had to speak honestly I’d promise nothing
less than one day I too will die. I don’t desire the political honor of
dismemberment. I don’t have any desires or preferences. I don’t dare to prefer.
Forgive me for intruding. On today of all days. She is no longer
here. Her scent lingers, like a hum. Flipping the page, I feel
smothered / swept into the Trisuli River. As if the world is about to
end or place me on eternal hold, I read survivor accounts of state
violence and I’m reading so quickly the names and crimes and
protests blur together in the primordial soup of nostalgia. Primordial
soup: two bay leaves, star anise, and green peppercorn. Nostalgia: a
reference term used in the aftermath of government-sponsored
revisionist history. The word as my text. My word is nothing without
the official seal of the puppet governor an official-elect of the rebels
who once decried democratic crimes against humanity. I’m vague.
I’m gushing. But I’m talking about us. We didn’t have a choice of how
to desire survival. We were hardly a war. We war. There was
always a war. I stopped reading, ears perked up at the smooth
cadence of a leaky bathroom faucet. Instead of burying my head
in archival peat (e.g. my grandmother’s garden), I touch the engraved
names of known relatives who are honored at the memorial. This was
during a time when action was preferable to silence.
At the far end of the building, the white artist whose work expropriates
Indigenous iconography asks why I am ashamed of my ancestry. Who
are you grieving? How do I answer under these conditions? I spread the mat
beneath the studio space, lying stomach down. Mouth ajar in the hopes
of catching rainwater. I guess if I had to speak honestly I’d promise nothing
less than one day I too will die. I don’t desire the political honor of
dismemberment. I don’t have any desires or preferences. I don’t dare to prefer.
Recipe for Elastic Soap Mouth
CATHERINE CHEN is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) and Other Monsters of Love (Container), both forthcoming in 2019. Their work has appeared in Slate, Apogee, Hobart, Sundog Lit, and Nat. Brut, among others. They’ve been awarded fellowships and residencies from Millay Colony, Lambda Literary, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Art Farm.