Tyann Prentice

  TO SEE YOUR LOVE SUFFER


 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

When my lover hits me my pores swell through their depth and hold tight to the hair, the hair anchors and peals in the shock-pitch, becomes a resonator, a tuning fork singing the distance between my inner and outer, my one and my zero-love, my body that towers and plummets the waves running through me

I let the pain make me an imaging device. I let the pain take me subsurface where I live in sympathetic radar to the color I see when I’m collapsed to my depth but still love-sick and sighing the air and then

Sent down by the blow, further under water to aggregate sand but my body can’t help to come up again, won’t stay without air there though I try—it won’t to be held down. I push back at the denser body, I bend up to him vertebrally jacked and ask to suffer gravity—struck back and sent down. Some call the sea floor a bed but there are miles of iron below where I sleep and dreams are this thinking, magnetized. I see a sex tape. I see a woman degraded though it’s hard to tell whether actress or tape is the one worn­—I’m the recording. Leagues of water a lens and my body exposed to this imprint—the passivity of film or so distanced from the action a copy of a copy of a copy I fight through the impersonation of me feigning guilt to have it punished in the lead magnetics of my body brute force and a heavy heavy gain—so I can read the marks so I can make a map so I can exit and leave the conjecture intact in a self past myself to the reflection I see when I rupture and scatter the mirror to grain—countless shards of light are this sand I’m bedded in as he pushes me down

(I’m an actor in the drama of the event. I’m present to it, it’s present to me—through description, through detail, setting indelible heavy and a sickness as true

I say let me be the room, the house. Let me be enclosed of myself. I imagine this, and then I’m empty. And then I disappear. Just a slip of color between gradations in a language where my presence can’t be discerned because I’m projected by it, the language—pure reflection. I’m in being above my thoughts

I say I’m seeing, and I do)

PERFORATION AT THE EDGES OF HOLES MAKES A WHOLE


My breath
a mouth open flush up against
it,
a turn of the head
in waking
I feel with my mouth, all sense now, is in it
all things now, are in it
I’m speaking there’s a room again

My body

I’m hearing
it,
the sound waits and echoes a definition of enclosure
the article of me
(a/the)
praying for a wound
through wounds I will feel—possessed by their sight

Wounding the first attempt at a body and any structure of ideas vulnerable at its holes

This is the practice, prayer
that makes my mouth a cage for a dead language—
these congenital signs that point to nothing or are nothing but themselves

(holes)

but margins, but erasure between the interference of my body

and (my body)

A lark or
parrot as prayer

(a dead language)

I’m hearing it
the sound waits and echoes
this refractional way of being alone
riding the horrors of reception into me
specular modes of travel through the body

(I must singularly exist)
(I say this to myself)

the air
I cannot and must contain

it,
then

to the marrow-form or substance shaken
out of a name
ripped into bone

The hex strata of which is doubly
a name

(a name)

so a body is found
among the many breathing counted by its sound

I WANT TO SEEM TO DIE IN NUMBERS


Failure is always connected to counting

One, two… I’m waiting, wanting to come up against a difference, the repetition I fail, fail the first breath, fail it’s inculcation, supplant it with the exception I know I can become

an albino totem starved of air and it’s bothered skin, a screen

is where I’m stroked for luck. Count the redness, caloric degrees of tactual saturation­ that make me what I am, or visible—a color as touched

Yes I see : You are

The astringent pink of my eye as it blinks, rubs between our fettered lids and the vestige there that dries—secretes a desert under us. We cried so hard to acquire this bent vision of God, bodily, under the broad and heavy water, held our attention fast to the angle of repose of this rain that floods and makes the desert glass until our sight replaced the necessity of repetition that is living, made it a blind heat—

countless grains of sand to glass and the abacus blinking, zero to one

Becoming the power of the flood to assume a body—this is the practice

So I say pray with me and you ask of me the same and we do we collaborate a tongue but there are no words, no miracles—just visions, scenes. These signs as movable from our surface as leather from hide are repeated, reproduced in this constant impersonal love that becomes our religion, our religion that becomes somatic, cinematic

A flicker at the terminal curve of my eye, I see myself flattered

like this, everyday skinned impressions in the same controlled pattern and I’m waiting for it to fail the counting—let the projection slip and purge

An accumulative function
this counting, the allegiance to deficit that makes me an empty mouth

or God

when ravenous­—it
writes like this:
the word says create
the mouth writes chew

TO SEE YOUR LOVE SUFFER


In the light I’m cold and my mouth opens. Moving through and down, a shunt breath culled or curled out something reaching and pulling in an open lobe, arcing. I look up and not beside, the vision, sectioned, disintegrates a shape as waves of white light break against me, my body tensed to contain cold and the fear

I try to pry it I IT AM out, pry out IT AM I, pry IT I AM, but the body ordered so minutely tight and the boundary mouth opened wide against me, magnified, a sense that’s mirrored in the closing

(I hear the sound of doors opening, closing, and move through a series in which I am cured of a shadow)

The shadow forfeits, deflects, rests in the soft rust of a nail in the wall. A time of what, harrower, thrown against and—punctuated the texture of it, an intersection to sever and draw blood near the surface, closer to, a blush against me, heat a burning glove pressed leather tight as skin. Red light and the room a musk smell murmur of a wound texture—the wall is rippling with it, puckers, inverts to pores, tiny hairs breach the surface and stiffen to the nails that catch and pull my breath along in waves, shuddering

Hyperventilation or an intervention—mimesis

My hands reaching out, face up, in front of—feel me, fill me with something

(I beg)

But nothing, not there, traces back and fastens my skin though I feel it—ether, clear, congealed. It anneals me, the room hot with blood and baking my skin to plaster a sheet on me starched salt and sweat wrapped round, layers stiff in a combining hell shrouded space of atrophy. I move and the skin crumples, cracks in fissures running off my arms in drought alluvia digging down and finding anchor in my veins—I’m breaching

folding in skewers of light in which I’m severed and bound

I’m breathing
out through creases that once were lungs—

I fly the light through
this suck of context to the senses

I peel it to ease
(suffocation)

I peel it to see
(       )

I peel it my skin comes off sticky rose mucous strung gossamer thread tethers lithe less the weight of blood distend and break from the muscle surface in mechanical clicks so clean there’s no sorrow in excoriation, no matter between my God and me

My blood

dried and caked hard in me, centrifuged tight around a gut-charged column of air, keeping it, my blood shies from my surface and the muscle underneath withers in retreat

I shrink—
I look harder to the shadow for a claw some salient reflection that will know and hold me to it

I shrink—
and am distanced from my skin—I’m inside it as in an empty room

I sweat, percolating walls of sheetrock that buckle and sag sopped paper over gypsum tearing down in pulpy seams—a sentience—trailing blood out of pores, running rapids down and slower near the floor, clotting it a newly menstrual carpet

(Yes I know the walls are bleeding now. I’m hilt, I’m gunpoint crystalline but unable to generate meaning)

What do I know—is it horror is it ghostly

Can I put my head through it, the wall, will I come out the other side, another room—secret in secret

What reads as flesh I’ll turn to glue, I’ll theorize it—the ether clear congealed

The ghost looks at the body. The ghost licks off the body. The body demands an apparition in reparation for such lewd exposure. This becomes its sex—

to which the ghost is bound as drool. The ghost is lubrication between the body and I, luster—this is the obligation I’m fucking through. The beauty, the passion of this blood like nothing but itself. A body, a liquid border that capsizes, that rends, runs viscous and muddy in red—ever brighter and breaks, spectral frequency, an assault on the eye

as it flows faster down to a tenement skin, clots and stalls at the floor leaving the juncture bones dry of it

The harder I try

to strain and suck in, breath against nails, hooking air out of me—the harder the blood falls as skin. Red lipid start of soft tissue separate yet so densely multiple no human mind can number it, no human hand could solder the beads strung like herring scales so perfectly seamed no idle thing in between. I breathe out and the nails drive harder into the wall, the pores begin to suppurate, sweat drops of dead blood, nails digging and finding veins the blood ever faster now furcating—veils of sluice that obscure the source wounds. Blood braiding into patterns of glyph and cruor before me and a pulse in the walls embossed by hard angle of light

I see many things

I read the walls until I understand that only communicable through shadow. I hold my breath and try to trap light tighter against shapes, try to hold a language but the heat, the sight pushes into dry dying, evaporating the light now diffused as my breath eases back to me

I inhale the blood-wet iron air that slivers my lungs—mercury run down my throat back and tongued, lung drapes of chainmail hot metal I breathe convective winds that heat-shrink the skinned walls to a texture, dead skin scabbed against new, I seed the blood growing darker as it sinks and edges the floor in sensation of my own outer plaster cast of skin peeling and sloughing off me

The harder I

(There’s nowhere in this exchange to rest or resist. IT IS and I AM the constant of or in it—what’s become of breathing)

I breathe in, I know
I breathe out, I believe

(This is an attempt to hide my true desire from myself, playing like I don’t have a crush when I do—I won’t look it in the eye. I’ll adhere an air of indifference in an attempt to overt the imposition of my imagination and my material desire onto this desire. This desire that I want to keep naked, that I want in no way to be fulfilled

so I hide it
or cultivate a decoy

A God, something to be loved and desired but never had

But what will you look like or do to me this time, how you turn your back on me to see if I still believe, and then one of us disappears)

THE LOVER AND THE BED, UNMADE


Thirty and a half years old and I get sick but I’m eager with it, lie sacked and wrinkled to the bed three days three nights and on the fourth this man comes to cleanse me, procedurally—a reduc tion of the senses

(Purification attained through deprivation in his system it serves a slavish living through the dead: a forced sterility—instrumentation, baptismal surgery, preemption to the clasp connecting me to guilt and time, an isolation)

But I want the sickness. I want to follow it open-nerve and inked enough to tell it back threaded blue and trailing my imitation in drift nets of veins, extraction I embroidered my arteries knit and furrow to his back and stitched the lashes there, closed but still breathing newly gilled to sieve my love/his flesh the broad and heavy water there over me un-drowned

I want to bisect the self that dies. I want to be it’s only witness, a dirty mirror in all your jealousy you reflect to hear a willful tongue and say it like this: I want to die like a dog or echo off the eyelid though the image there is not my own—it’s my loving being loved and you can’t die watching, the dog it doesn’t see it’s own blood on the hands of the master it only knows it wants it—sieved through the leash

The leash that

keeps me bound to myself in imposition, can’t see my hunger from the dirt yes loving being loved works the slop as I masturbate sic but don’t you know jealousy is a position of paradox, it’s only concern: to create and break the tertiary created by the imposition of witness to withness

(and the distance between, when I am where I’m not)

Self-preservation (is) this image removed from (its) reference—cut diamond with diamond away, a will apart and nothing left over to make the impossible impossibly true like a God but the vicar is a facet

This sickness—like I could love so hard make a man wanna be Christ or spook the butcher off his tongue—make the other say I for me

But not this one, no this man is merely religious and lacks the proper ferocity to force a lie when he says my name utter that death unsay the duplicity in such an absolute refusal of life that my living becomes the desire of desire only and leaves my hunger unimposed

but I gave him my blight abundance

I know this now I surrendered the harmonic decay I should have kept with me erred through heat death and solar dirge

a hand in a hand in a hold on myself

and the tension, circuitous, so I could hear my zero-love calling me back to nothing

But this man

I relented hoping I didn’t really know what I knew or that my forgetting was complete and irreversible. I waited. I was

haunted by an ahistoricity
that left me illegible and rawed apart words—
annexed and a suture unlaced
as I’m drawn by it along a length
—the cripple-arm, a recursion and self-same
I swallow my fist
In my fist is a locket
empty around the charge
pulling ore-black needles through a hole that becomes the air I throat
because I’m nothing if not the vanity through which I’m terrorized

and my faith in the terror to make me stupid
and my terror of the stupidity that makes me faithful

This stupidity—I am myself for no other reason than description

Description, tattoo
rain that makes my breath an ocean
around a terrible attention, the needled contact
That many speaking goose bumps in succession
one after the other only owed to the one before
is a drop for every nerve undone—
all in error of God
And I’m left between the simultaneity of each distinction
as I’m displaced from the world to be dead by morning

(But after this I lingered on—two days, two nights—and on the second night I understood that I was dying, assenting fully, but again I endured till day as my body went slowly dead from middle down to all shape and feeling, dying by the inches, my legs disappearing, my torso a pillar impossibly upright in the narrow buoyant bed)

I wanted revelation. I wanted to see past death. I wanted a pistol I wanted a God solid male and human body I thought gunfire was love. I thought I could die however many times and return to life hymen in tact. But every time I’m born I’m back a straw bride. No virtue to cast a sign upon. I’m perforated ripped through gnatty and stitched and now they come projected on a screen torn before me, a sense distended my skin displaced as retina

Revelation comes to me now, delayed contrition, freely without seeking after begging blood like a wretch. But I don’t want it now. I’ve seen with a body made object to touch I’ve capitulated I’ve conceptualized I’ve bled my feral organs out. This begging youth a whatever-long act of purgation, nailed and spread fast on your hard rood my circumscript skin stretched open or extraction, my skin brandished as habit, my skin prolonged, my margins breached and made many raw with this burden—I beg now to be sealed. I lie three days and three nights at the threshold of death

Send a man to murder me before I die a duplication

I call upon him. I say I’m seeing. I say I’m about to behold and then I do—an interrupt witness, a body between light and the eye





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TYANN PRENTICE has led a whisper of a life thus far. She studies mysticism, designs things for paper and sometimes writes in Seattle, WA.