A Scarcity of Lazarus, who is she?
By Petra Whiteley
H'Anna K floats in the translucent green glass of the bottle, carefully placed on the dressing table. She is as beautiful as ever. Her skin is whiter than my first day at school, whiter than the dentist's chair, whiter than scalpel of a surgeon cutting my legs to separate the red Orinoco from the dirt of wounds, the crucifixion of childhood; although H-Anna whispers "We were Never Never children! You and I!” she winks at me, her eyes swallow the Sun; they swallow the cats from all over London.
We go to her garden, it is overgrown like mine should be, the rain comes down at it hard, but as for us, it does not touch our skin at all, the polluted water avoids us like the plague. Before we dripped into the jungle of the city, she sunk her bazooka right into her fragile air. I felt the vapours, it was enough for everything to remain bitten by the colours that it was born in before the Eden fuck up. She folds and straightens her skirt carefully, sits delicately on the lilac painted bench. I cut some flowers for magic show later, now they bite my nails, the tendrils of the flowers grip on vowels of broken languages in the high pitch, their French manicure will cost me ten of my lives, but I don't care. The machine in a hat and an elegantly woven rope around the thick neck, the machine with the set of blazing teeth in a wide grin, the giant of ten stun grenade arms is at work in the City of London, it's counting the hair of the slaves, who will not remember their names, or their children, they'll only move their arms up and down in a slow mesmerizing motion. It will not bother us here. We talk of careful slicing of silences, those that no tongue has dared to shape.
It grows dark; H'Anna K takes the umbrella folded underneath the decaying wood, upon that tight rope we walk back to the house. That customized house with amnesia of elephants in its belly, it belches with acid of putting food into the mouth steadily over the years, synthetic fabrication of cranked up minutes, droning scales of hours chewing on the vital functions, which are now the size of mashed up peas.
Nevertheless she ignores this dust gathered so, throws it like a dishcloth into the dustbin from where it will crawl out in the morning. I follow her, trying hard not to trip over the small abandoned porcelain tidbits on the floor. I know this is never going to repeat. She invites me for a cup of tea, and then we enter her paintings. There are the grey empty wombs of death, with her twisted hungering fingers of pain. We dive into its terrors, its layers of breakdown. There are also her dreams, the soothing paws of tigers. I have their amber eyes in my sockets. We emerge from the asylum for the girls unadjusted, unadjusted still but in one piece. We are two small points bobbing up and down on the cold summer sea under the colossal chair with a giant skeleton of Buddha, his decomposing skin loosely hanging on the skull, blown out of his bones, bones corroded, he sits there, laughing and laughing into the eternity, that withered jaw, spelling out the joke of existence. The ice of words reaches further, we find it right on the stairs that lead out, somewhere. Out. But step there, regardless.
- - -
'All that is unhomelike in the future, and whatever maketh strayed birds shiver, is verily more homelike and familiar than your 'reality'. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
Petra Whiteley was born in Czech and lives in UK since 1993 and is the author of 'The Moulding of Seers' (Shadow Archer Press, 2009) and 'The Nomad's Trail' (Ettrick Forest Press, 2008), she is a regular writer for The Glasgow Review and Osprey, poetry and prose published in many print and online magazines.
By Petra Whiteley
H'Anna K floats in the translucent green glass of the bottle, carefully placed on the dressing table. She is as beautiful as ever. Her skin is whiter than my first day at school, whiter than the dentist's chair, whiter than scalpel of a surgeon cutting my legs to separate the red Orinoco from the dirt of wounds, the crucifixion of childhood; although H-Anna whispers "We were Never Never children! You and I!” she winks at me, her eyes swallow the Sun; they swallow the cats from all over London.
We go to her garden, it is overgrown like mine should be, the rain comes down at it hard, but as for us, it does not touch our skin at all, the polluted water avoids us like the plague. Before we dripped into the jungle of the city, she sunk her bazooka right into her fragile air. I felt the vapours, it was enough for everything to remain bitten by the colours that it was born in before the Eden fuck up. She folds and straightens her skirt carefully, sits delicately on the lilac painted bench. I cut some flowers for magic show later, now they bite my nails, the tendrils of the flowers grip on vowels of broken languages in the high pitch, their French manicure will cost me ten of my lives, but I don't care. The machine in a hat and an elegantly woven rope around the thick neck, the machine with the set of blazing teeth in a wide grin, the giant of ten stun grenade arms is at work in the City of London, it's counting the hair of the slaves, who will not remember their names, or their children, they'll only move their arms up and down in a slow mesmerizing motion. It will not bother us here. We talk of careful slicing of silences, those that no tongue has dared to shape.
It grows dark; H'Anna K takes the umbrella folded underneath the decaying wood, upon that tight rope we walk back to the house. That customized house with amnesia of elephants in its belly, it belches with acid of putting food into the mouth steadily over the years, synthetic fabrication of cranked up minutes, droning scales of hours chewing on the vital functions, which are now the size of mashed up peas.
Nevertheless she ignores this dust gathered so, throws it like a dishcloth into the dustbin from where it will crawl out in the morning. I follow her, trying hard not to trip over the small abandoned porcelain tidbits on the floor. I know this is never going to repeat. She invites me for a cup of tea, and then we enter her paintings. There are the grey empty wombs of death, with her twisted hungering fingers of pain. We dive into its terrors, its layers of breakdown. There are also her dreams, the soothing paws of tigers. I have their amber eyes in my sockets. We emerge from the asylum for the girls unadjusted, unadjusted still but in one piece. We are two small points bobbing up and down on the cold summer sea under the colossal chair with a giant skeleton of Buddha, his decomposing skin loosely hanging on the skull, blown out of his bones, bones corroded, he sits there, laughing and laughing into the eternity, that withered jaw, spelling out the joke of existence. The ice of words reaches further, we find it right on the stairs that lead out, somewhere. Out. But step there, regardless.
- - -
'All that is unhomelike in the future, and whatever maketh strayed birds shiver, is verily more homelike and familiar than your 'reality'. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
Petra Whiteley was born in Czech and lives in UK since 1993 and is the author of 'The Moulding of Seers' (Shadow Archer Press, 2009) and 'The Nomad's Trail' (Ettrick Forest Press, 2008), she is a regular writer for The Glasgow Review and Osprey, poetry and prose published in many print and online magazines.
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