1.
rude flesh, erodes – private treasonwhere is the valour in guileful flesh
extend maps to include seditious bodies
read testimonials into the mapped bodies of others
bodily locations elaborate an embodied, situated ethics
one hand feels the other, looping, perpetual
map the body in your infant brain
bodies as diagnostic
bodies as pedagogies
bodies both do and do not facilitate touch
bodies narrate their own decline, a tautology
2.
bodies map depthcell atlases map the entirety of bodies
anxious, exquisite meat
the importance of touch and feeling over seeing and the scopic – this passionate
intelligent and memory-driven flesh
the world that you see is not the world that exists
it has been heavily retouched by your retina
a string that aims to weave a cell atlas
maps are consequential in constructing a feared self
bodies foreclose narratives
bodies as monuments and parables
poem for flesh
there is no symmetrythis, far from an easy moment
both representation
and intelligent silence
in other words perfectly cultural
an arcane meaning
opaque definitions
the bodies move thru
this opacity like cursive notes
epigrammatic but sterling
what is lost
when the centre cannot hold
the theory of the maternal imagination (after Rosi Braidotti’s “Monsters, Mothers, and Machines”)
my womb bears living capitalmonsters are borne of three acts:
thinking
dreaming
and looking
the theory of (imagi)nation
an imagination is a hypothesisthis shared cloud that looms
over our texts and breathings
borderlessness recast as barbarism
choking the front lines
empirically, thresholds are ghosts
borders saw bodies into segments
that get stacked, segregated, and caged
poem for a new geography
the point is that this is built from experiencethe times I was called upon to traverse great expanses such as
parking lots, shopping malls, schoolyards, interminable
bridges over dark waters here
is a list of all that has not broken me
a page left intentionally blank to
make a point like a door slamming shut
Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative doctoral dissertation at Brock University, examining connections between contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She was a 2017-18 visiting lecturer in Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is a 2019-20 Fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her critical writing has been published in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, BC Studies, Tripwire, Prefix, and elsewhere, and she has published three poetry chapbooks with above/ground press. Tweet at @juliawants
Banner Art: “Entangled” by Robert Frede Kenter
IceFloe Press 