Daughter of Marxism — Tenement Press

Rehearsal / 12. Jess Cotton

^{Daughter of Marxism}

_{Sitting atop a hill in Orvieto the child could see nothing but

ten wild goats, herding their young. There were woods to hide

in but he preferred his own jokes, still new to them, still sticky

on the tongue as he found his language inside it. Sitting atop

a hill in lent an old man remembered only the first time he

had learnt the trick of looking up schoolteacher’s skirts. Now

he takes to the shops, headfirst brandishing a ruler, the length

of a stomach, such games the child finds endearing. Sitting

atop a hill, hard to climb, outside the hospital, newly built with

petroleum negatives, the ageless woman gasps the hyaline air,

crosses herself with the frenzied motions of a man rocking

himself under a tundra of cloud, orange as Ophelia, feeling

hope fall. Sitting atop a hill in Marseille the woman dreamt

of panisses and oranges, and antibodies in small black hats,

and wounds that laugh gutturally, cooked them herself, did

the work of a sore aureole and took the child back to the crib.}

_{Where may it be spring?

Here not

but somewhere? It was an uncertain spring.

Spring,

she said come again.}

^{States of Bewilderment}

_{States of emergency are states of the spoken

body speaking bodily is not yet to have spoken

paralysis is not a body that can be airlifted into

speech. In the insane light of morning anxiety

flings through the window. The inside let’s itself

out. A breath, a sight, a whimper curdles in the

edge of rain around the window’s exhalation. The

graphable chokes out the rainbow, we eat data for

breakfast. Data vomits a synchronised spectrum

of dominance, turns white to red. Pain is regular,

justifiable, flesh-wrapped, monetary. We, are all

in this together, the roaring clap sounds as night

falls, we, explodes in the past memory.

States of working the pink tongue-typed hour. The

end is close but who could be closer than this, you,

hey stranger! holed up, the shrapnel of injury shoves

the spring panic into the serviceable branches of the

imagination. Babes would be born, babies would not

be borne. Still nationalism, still forms, still buildings,

still landlords, still deposits kept, still bastards stilling

time. Time’s up. Time for breakfast, have radishes with

your apocalypse, keep speaking of the not gardens at

the heart of the city where the real green is. Partial

inventory of morning says time’s up time and time’s

up can it still be true, for how long can it still be true.

The best states are not of the mind but of the mind

dreaming. Entry level planning, entry level planting.

Even then, armed not with resources. Disability plants

itself inside the memorandum money is no object. The

collective body speaks the words of a Russian scientist

with a feel for life after death, whilst other states choose

certain death. Loved ones never your loved ones. There is

not a we to hold but we are in neither of these places. The

streets are unoccupied, the streets will be occupied, listen

to the sounds that plant themselves, bring back the stall, a

state of mind communal, have you not listened to it out the

window.

Out the window an in breath punctures your chest. Everybody

is your body now, your body is everyone’s, alright Whitman !

Hard to believe there are this many holds inside, buildings to

occupy, downloading hope in the isolation station. Laughter

shakes us into focus, inducing labour pains. The family cannot

hold up, held up, for this we offer prayers. One rose for another

rose, a dream of an empty street with flames at your back and

crowds with no faces, pumpkins beached. We are all beached

whales in the aftermath of a golden libertarian coalition. The

starry vespers are cute, play cutely, the minister said, letting

go of the frame, the body sings, the body slings a shot out the

window. The colonel said he would write the poem himself.

Failed states speak with cotton in their mouths. It is not a

brief history, it is an ongoing history of nothing that is not

inviolable nothing that is not inalienable nothing that is not

not addressable. All things wash up at low tide, as long as the

satrapies are in order. The present madness is singular: crisis

and power qualified to the nth power. This is not theory. This

is not Marx and Hegel though they knew. This is not your boy

friend in the pub telling you he is a philosopher, drinking on

someone else’ expense. That is all. Workers in Iowa withhold

their labour in exchange for the certainty that we will commit

ourselves to building safety. Here is a model you say, we say,

with working lungs.

States scatter ashes the wind blows back onto its

greener soil. There is a history of feeling of weather testing,

weathering is the work of mourning in climates where grief

is ordinary, everyday, we could be saved by a rubber boat,

a comet, of the imagination, the alternatives are your guess

gage, gauge, gall, foreclosed feeling, tot up the past, fabric a

feel of possession. Flow, break the flow, it is not operational,

it is not optional. The only relief is relief in grief, grief that is

taken hold of, grief that leaps to frenzy. Such states produce

octaves of rage that have not yet been discovered. The time to

discover them is time up, growing inside, inside balloons

outwards, the future, a fracked heaven floats over red sand.}

^ANNA

_{Today I wake to

a crest of your

orange pink

leaves and

find autumn

where once

‘you’ were

Someone says

‘keep busy’

Someone belts

out an absolute

of truth that

three-act

structures

are old props

and ‘things can

only be looked

at too closely’

Take, for example,

this body on this

morning blue

some would say

breathless some

might say if it

were not still

beating

And most of all Anna

I fear your fear of

waking one morning

to this morning to a

textured thing one

cannot clasp between

finger and thumb like

your voice its feeling

things that cannot un-

happen like a woman

or an island of which

you are both}

^{JEANNE MOREAU}

_{I think only of you on this damp, unlikely

morning (there is an air strike, there is an

announcement, there are hearts broken,

there are limps transplanted) or rather of your

hard cool stare in La Notte that looks back

at no one but is our screen through which we

flounder for sympathy glimpsing your reflection

in Monica Vitti’s three-way-looking glass as

she scrambles across a marble living chess

set of a life of her own invention for what

else was there and how when you walk past

the rockets (how many rockets had you seen

in your love before, thousands, you say, none

you say) a masterpiece of indifference and so

you keep on walking knowing that your

world is better than no one’s and to turn

round, to pause and to admire that which we

recently built would be to risk not short of

everything}

^VITTORIA

_{Outside it all grows stronger the liquor lacking

up the pan shot into the still of your cap-cropped

dress across which we hear the unspent foliage of

women hammering into walls into the next room

And so you appeal to too much stock to the blaze

and furnace of our autumn hearts spent in black-

and-white throes where fury is a kind of mutual

investment on bulking shores

And so we take leave of the trees while they still

stand where the untoppled balloons soar over roads

that lead into a sandpiper of a moon under which

the children still play and a man goes on reading a

paper of news and where someone is about to cut

our last patch of green}

^{Jess Cotton is a writer living in London. She mostly writes about poetry.}

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