Elena Vizerskaya
The Choir of
Dissatisfaction
For too many years I have come to this place alone with nothing but two buckets full of memories and tears and my many pains. They splash all over the carpet and the grass and the dusty dirt that turns to mud. When my feet sink and I am ankles deep, It's no longer an option to leave here. The place I call home calls me sorrow. It is ruined and bitter and tastes like dead leaves, and I can only wonder when my heart will stop beating. That's it isn't it? That is the end? When the little muscle in the middle of you stops working, it doesn't matter how well you eat or sleep or run through the forest. It doesn't matter how well you plant the bread crumbs so that you can find your way back. And what is the way back? You get to choose between life this way or that. You get to bite the hand that beats you or twist your sister’s wrist and make her desperate walk to the kitchen. There the two of you hide. You will not be found. You will not be bitter. You will taste the razor’s edge of the crickets' wings, and you will sing into their bodies the songs they sang in the woods. That twilight when they took your mother. You were in your room, drinking in her cancer while your sister waited in the back yard, so parch and so thirsty and so cold. Maybe you should have chosen the witch. Maybe she would have stayed a little longer than your mother did. It was an early death, the cancer that took her. And she tried every way to save herself. She spread herself across the slab of modern medicine, and she rummaged through the wooden aisles of the ancient remedies from old as well. And she bit the root and the leaf and the living things that hide inside the forest. And as you ran by, you could hear them singing by rubbing their slender legs together. They are a choir of dissatisfaction. They are a croaking orchestra, playing the dirge for her death. They are a requiem, and they make their music until the day they die as well.
Letters &
Numbers
I can see you at the board with your broken piece of chalk and your lip torn to pieces by your sharp white teeth. You are thinking. It's a problem. You are looking at the letters and the numbers, and you are trying to solve things. You see the sharp edges of the capital letters. Letters that could cut you. Could make you bleed. In a moment of desperation when you are all alone and packed into the tiny room where you have slept since you were small, these letters could prove to be quite dangerous. You keep them, these jagged symbols of sound and thought, in a box inside your brain. And now you stand at the front of the class and there they are, calling to you. Tempting you. If you could reach into the board and pull the letters from the equations that you now find so painful, you would. The string of letters and numbers stretch in front of you and they would wrap themselves around your throat tightly if you were alone in the classroom. But you are not alone so you need to pretend that you are not alone. You need to sell that to yourself. And so you try. You try to solve the problem. You know somewhere in the problem is an expression of infinity. You know the symbol. It's a number eight tipped to its side. It represents forever. And forever is without a doubt your most vicious enemy. Because it reminds you daily that there is no forever for you. You don’t believe in it. There is an end for you. You want to step back and stretch your arms and tilt yourself to the side. You want to make a figure eight of your body that twirls about you and circles your head and never ends. It is a loophole. It can keep forever at bay. It can take the torture and the torment that you face from all the letters that are spiky and ragged and harmful, It can unwrite the letters that you would leave. It can erase the unraveling of your vital organs that would come out of you and onto the floor and spill across your childhood bedroom. Because in that bedroom you are closer to death than birth. And if you could stand in that bedroom with your arms connected at your fingers, expressing the equation that ends with forever, maybe that bedroom could once again be a place where all you do is sleep and breathe and dream.
Like an
Animal
There is a door. It's enormous. It's the biggest door you've ever seen. In fact if you stand too close you would never know it's a door. You might think it's a wall. Or a mountain. Or a man with his back turned. You could easily mistake the door for an eclipse of the moon. But it's the door to the rest of the world. I have knocked on this door, and I have stood back and waited for the creaking of the door. But the door doesn't open for me. My hands are slender, but my arms are strong. I certainly am capable of making a noise on the door, but when I knock on the door there is no noise. The world doesn't hear me. The door is not wood. It’s glass. With the lights off, it seems black. But in the middle of the day, it’s clear and everyone on the other side of the door can see standing there. I am vulnerable, knocking and knocking. I am hoping that they will let me in. But they don’t want me on their side. They like seeing me desperate. It’s easy for them because they cannot hear me. I am like a television on mute. They don’t have to know my thoughts. That's good for them. Knowing my thoughts might make it difficult to ignore my knocking. Because they want to reach through the door with nothing but their eyes. Eyes that are blue or brown or hazel. Eyes that are green. Eyes that come at me like the tips of wet fingers. I am a puppet. Their fingers would train me. Tame me. Touch me. And yet the glass door would never permit it. A few can sneak under the door or through the hinges. Some have keys. These few stand over me when I sleep. They gaze at me in my trembling slumber, but they wonder about my thoughts. They can touch me with their fingers. They can see me with their lips. And I am nothing but an object. They want to disarm me and take me apart. The only way I know to defend myself is to make myself into layers. I make my face as many layers as myself. I put one copy of my face onto another. Because even though my body is always vulnerable to their touch, I don't want them to touch my real face. If they can take my face, they will see me. My thoughts will leap out. My feelings will be impossible for them to avoid. They will spring from my face like the animal I am. And my thoughts and feelings will demand that the people who live on the other side of life know me. They will have to know me without seeing me because I won't have a face. The body will have been ravaged. It will grow again. The pieces will go to seed. But without my face, there will be nothing to protect them from me. The layers are there for their sake as well. Because if I am not layered, I am raw. And if I’m raw, I’m a threat to everyone of them. I will infect their unprotected fingers. I will destroy them with my truth.
Milk
Bath
I fill the hole with fields of flowers and then I step into the hole. It is a bath. It is an embrace. And I have decided tonight that I will live. I will embrace myself. I will convince my heart to beat harder. I will fill my lungs and hold the air inside of them for just a few moments longer than I would have when I was dry. I will eat the surprises that I have left for myself because I took them from the earth without looking. I brought in pieces of the earth that were sweet and thick and wet and sticky. Because I am not afraid to get sticky. This bath will keep me clean. Nothing can happen to me here. And if it happens, I can wash it from me. I can take all of the weight of the world, and I can wash it from my body. When I am clean, I will be strong. When I am clean, I will resurrect. I will rise up out of this tub and stretch myself into the ceiling of the air. Because I am bathing in the middle of a field. I am bathing in the middle of a desert. I am cleaning myself in the corner of my kitchen. Because this is how I live. I am not a wealthy woman. I am not the kind who confronts herself with the pains of poverty. I have always let myself be poor. But inside this tub I am the queen of Egypt. I am the goddess of the lily pads and the fields of poppies and the lost little girls who have not bathed themselves this year. But I am here to teach them. I am here to show them that there is a way to be naked and to be new. It is not about the individual girl. Because they are young and they are not clean. No. They can be clean, and they can be new and they can take the barbed wire of the world and they can pull it from their skin. The milky water will absorb the blood until there's not enough blood left. And then we can cut the pineapple. We can suck the cherry. We can pull the peonies across our bodies like a warm blanket that never gets wet but keeps us from ever getting dry or human.
“There Are So
Many Ways
to Die”
The hands of the huntsman confronted me in the woods and asked me if I had been eaten by the wolf. I told him no, and then he told me the truth. He lifted up his ax and split me like a piece of wood. He said, “the wolf is your friend and I hunt him because of that. I do not want him to defend you. I want to take you. I want to break you.” As I stood there with my face cut in half, I asked him what it was he wanted from me. And he said, “I want the flower.” He said, “I want the beauty that you keep inside you.” I looked at him and I could barely breathe but I was able to say, “why?” And he said, “because I have a flower inside of me, but I am afraid to touch it. I don't know how to get it. It gets stuck in my throat and slows down my heart. It’s the reason that I might die sooner than I choose. And so I thought if I could touch your flower, I could at least die knowing how it works.” And I said that my flower would not be like his flower. And he said, “if I stole the flower from you it would be mine.” And I said, “you cannot steal my flower because it belongs to me.” He said, “look at your head. I have cut it in half. The flower is there. It's mine to take.” I thought to myself that maybe he was right. But before I could give him the flower he took it. He said it was more symbolic if he took it. He took the flower and he took me and he took the parts of me that were not cut. He cut those parts as well. When he was done, he left me in the road like kindling that was too small for a fire. I sat there with nothing left until I felt the sun turn its back on me. And in the middle of the night the other one came. He picked up the pieces and took them to his home. In his home he sewed me back together. He went into his garden and he carefully picked a bouquet that he then placed inside of me before he sewed me up completely. When I could see again, I looked up into his eyes and I realized that he was the wolf. I said, “thank you.” He said, “I am not human. My race is much more used to kindness. You would think that we would be vicious. Sometimes you are right. But I have had dinner tonight. I do not need to eat you. It was the other one that I ate. The younger one. The one with the red hood.” He paused and picked his teeth with a sharp claw. “Do not make a mistake. I am still an animal. But you did not deserve to be split in half that way. I have murdered the huntsman. He will bother you no more. And now I would like to keep you for myself. Here in my home. To care of me as I age.” And I felt the flowers bulging in my head, and my eyes felt like they might pop. I looked into the wolf's eyes and I nodded my head. There are so many ways to die. This seemed like one as good as any other.
The Eyes of
a Butterfly
I have a hundred dance partners. Maybe more. I melt into the dance floor when I'm there, and I spin and twist and turn. My partners toss me this way or that. They are tiny though. They are the memories of imagination. They can fly. They squeak. They can find their way inside of me through the smallest entrances. We dance from the inside out. It is a magnificent dance. The lights are not the lights of the dancehall but rather the lights of the green-blue evening. They are the natural lights of so many lightning bugs. Of the moon. Of the glowing fog that sits around us like an audience. And there we are in the middle of a field that's been flattened by our feet. By my feet. When my feet actually hit the ground. Because I am light like the wings of a moth. Like the eyes of a butterfly. I am off the ground. I am in love with the music of the nighttime that echoes through the forest dancehall. This is freedom. When they invented the word, this is what they meant. And as people have struggled to find freedom for thousands and thousands of years, they did not know that freedom is here. It's in this dance. It's in this endless night because my eyes close when the sun comes up and they open again when the the moon is switched on. That’s when I feel the rhythm. I feel the tiny hands that beckon me. They beg me. Once again I sway and I kick and I spin and I arch my back and dip my head, stretching my arms as if they had strings tied to my wrists. It is the stars themselves that hold me aloft. This is the most beautiful resurrection because I am not being sacrificed to anyone but myself. If I were to die in the forest this way, my death would be a second life for me. If I could come back from the dead, I would come back to this dance. And all of my partners would be glad to see me. They are not my disciples. They are my Nureyev and Fred Astaire. They are the fireflies that spin me and dip me and circle me with light.
Author: Derek Letsch
Artist: Elena Vizerskaya
Elena Vizerskaya
It is a special space that looks rather like a dream filled with reflections and allusions. A space where many things meant to be felt, not understood, where you come back again and again.