Emma Jelk
Monster
The choir of the endless white waves ignores the monster on its side. The sand wrestles with the saltwater to become a brown sludge that holds him on the shoreline. She has made him. He is painted into the middle of the canvas with only one witness other than us who watch him living or dying or breathing or not. The particles of his beard stretch longer than a sunset underneath him.
The Exhausting
Search
The mouth of the sky kisses the lips of the earth. We are productive. We point. We gather. We crouch. The air rustles through the long grass, and the black patches of paint creep through the skin of the planet. Are they anxious? Are they worried? Should we be worried? Is she worried that she makes this thing? This work of art? This endless plane? This flatness? This exhausting search for danger?
The Train is Not
Coming
There is stillness in the underground. The beast has not yet traveled. We are safe to cross over. We are hidden in our protective suits. We are here for the hidden reasons. The air is stale. It is cold and wet. It is a wetness that is old. It is an age that has been trapped down here for as long as people have needed to travel. These tracks take us everywhere. She will not bring the train. We will ignore fear because the train is not coming. Not in this painting. Not today.
We Will
Do the Work
Human beings are here. You can see the remnants. You can see the things they have left behind. The basket is old. The space is old. The people who live here are even older. Outside of the window is the lie of light. It is the fog of disembodiment. It is the gray inner coat of vital organs. And we are trapped inside, trying to stay alive. Sooner or later we will do the work. The ancient work. The work that she has left for us. We will find the work in the browns and the tans and in the bruised blues of the implements that she has left for us. We will do the work. We will do the work. We will do the work, again.
The Falling Sky
There is this side and the other side. And the other side multiplied. And there are not more than three. And between us is the frozen river. The unfrozen river… because it is not cold enough or still enough or strong enough to bring us together. Yet being apart is exactly what we want. She has put us on each side. There is danger. There is the chance that someone might be hurt. There is the chance that someone might hurt someone else. Because we are already hurt. We are already feeling the pain of the gray blue that falls on us. There is no snow, but the sky is still falling. You can see it behind us. You can see it around us. This is the saddest state. The saddest country in the middle of the saddest season. We ignore the sadness. We grip tightly the weapons of our own gray sadness, and we wait for the spring connect to us again.
Mobile
Home
She breaks the winter with a sky that could make anyone smile, and yet here we are watching the empty husk of a body. She has painted a body that twice housed happiness, but now nature abandons. She is angry. She holds fear up to her eye. She looks lovely in her dress with the folds and shadows so perfectly figured, but she is not aware of it. Blame the endless plane. This is the country that is so flat and so cold even in the spring. Even under the teardrop blue sky. This is the country where violence can happen daily. She trembles just enough to squeeze the trigger on purpose or not. Only the dead things who saw her eyes just before the blast will ever know for sure.
Crushed and
Grounded
Once we could escape. Once people did. Once they traveled from one end of the earth to the other. And then back. And then back and back and back and forth. Until travel was no longer possible. Until escape was just someone's memory. Someone who no longer exists. So we stare at the hulk. We stare at the Leviathan. We stare at the monster like a dead whale on the edge of the ocean. And we see it's black tarnished blood streaming from underneath it like a shadow or gunpowder. Because this is also a weapon. This is something that could have killed. It might have killed. It still could. We sit on the edge of winter and we cry and we howl and we mew. We wait for a winter to run away and possibly crush us under the weight of the cockpit or the cabin.
Convenience
Nature has made human life inconvenient, and yet we still have found a way to collide. She makes us this way. She wakes up and she sees us from a dream that she had that might have made her happy and yet as she stares into her mind, the dream becomes this wintry nightmare. And while her children are off at school, her mind is left to explore the sorrow of our home. The collective sorrow of the people who live here in her home. And she is able to feel it. She can feel it in the colors that she uses to create this oasis. They are parked. And They stalk. They are shopping for the things that they think they need when the things that they truly need are lost and embedded in their frozen and broken dreams.
Harvest
Ill crops protrude from the Earth, and then my mind is bent on nothing but harvesting. The night looms over me, but I am lost. She wraps me in sunshine but the lights are on in the rooms that are dark, and the people who are not in those rooms are blind. I might be half hidden. I might be unseen. But the inevitable tempest of nature's trouble has seen me so long ago. If this is a place to hide, then I will hide. I will burrow. I will plant myself into this cold earth until one day I might shoot through the rough brown skin and be a stalk of light. To live tethered to the ground but still to be free in the breeze of spring that always promises to come. Spring that might go missing without me.
Out of the Bottom
of the Frame
She leans on violence and sunshine and the dusty memories of what once was a beautiful spring. The green grass is dead, and its starchy carcass lounges all about like the murdered on a battlefield. She's not interested in burying or cleaning or clearing. Her anger is a steel curse word or a red hot waste of time. Work hangs around her. She can't escape it. It can't escape her. Somewhere someone is unaware that she is angry. She is tired. She is worn out. The brown veins of the tree's shadow leak out the bottom of the frame. The paint brushes have brushed it all together like a dirty neat pile on the floor of a butcher’s shop just before the broom takes everything away.
Light Like an
Itch
Light like an itch spreads over the tummy of the tough rock that has seen infinite days on this Earth but now exists as a ruin in the middle of the forest. He stares at the light. He doesn't know that his future isn’t any different than this little beam of light. He thinks there are treasures and maps and wild creatures that live outside of him, but what he will discover is that these things are him. His dreams will be diseases one day and the people who are worried about where he is now will one day be dead. He will be the one in the house wondering where the little boy has gone off to. He will be the old one in the house wondering what is the little boy's middle name. Because he will have forgotten. Even if he can remember why the moss grows on one side of the rock and not on the other, he will have forgotten all the children’s names that eventually will come from him.
Holding on to
the Corners
She has stepped outside of the hospital and let imagination run cold on her thin white legs. She walks through this scene, creating the impossible. She pushes those golden tendrils away from her face before she wields her paint brush to make illusions out of reality. We are holding on to the corners of our shirts and the edges of our shorts and to the spots on our forehead that used to be thicker and fuller and covered with hair. The years that have passed and left us this way seem to lose all of their burden and all of their weight as the one lifts weightlessly through the blue summer sky. She wants us to enter. She wants us to see how common It is. How normal. How these wrinkled and worn people are simply living their lives inside of her head that has escaped from the safety and security of sanity. She has escaped from the hospital into the unrelenting reality of infection.
The Cabin
We come to this cabin as creatures and intruders. We are in a mist and a familiar darkness. Somewhere someone might be watching us. Or they might be simply living and breathing and eating or dying. It's impossible to know, but we do know that somewhere along the way they rejected the darkness. They might reject us. As we creep through this misery anonymously, we might be the unwanted ones lurking just outside. Yet the door is closed. The tower is dark. The evergreens are full while the other trees are as naked as we feel. Because even fully dressed, we feel uncovered. We feel unsafe. While the warm yellow light that she paints makes me want to feel at home, I am not at home. I am nowhere. I cannot turn around to see where I've been. And it's not clear where I need to go. But I'd like to be inside that cabin even if it comes with danger. Even if it comes with death. I'd like to see it just as everyone would like to. Because what's in that cabin is inevitable but it's warm and intoxicating.
Working
Away
She disarms us as if we are suspected criminals, standing meekly on the other side of the street. She paints the base, the beautiful, and the broken. She paints them in the middle of movement and the middle of thought. She paints them unaware. She paints them with worry. She paints them blissfully lost in the tepid thoughts of the everyday. Of the minutes between the things you do that matter. Those lost minutes that can wrap you up and make you cross your legs. That let you sit and stare at nothing. But then again who is staring at nothing? Because she is across the street with her easel. She is there with all her paint. She is there working away the anxiety that chases her like a cloud across a blue gray sky. The worry that runs like a tricycle down the middle of a dirt street. Down the middle of the poverty of a dusty dirt road.
All That’s
Left
What is it to be naked? What is it to be undressed? Is it where we wear the clothes that we only wear when we are alone? Is it to wear no clothes at all when we are alone with only those who are naked against us? Reality hangs above us like a sheet that we should have washed a month ago. And the blinding light of morning would molest us if it weren't for the shade of that linen sheet. But we are caught up in the embryo sleep that tries so hard to delete the many traumas that have batted us this way in that way as we navigate the minutes again. The minutes that live endlessly between the things that happen. And this sleep and these dreams get less and less effective as we get more and more closer to the end of things. Because maybe the truth of it all is that the traumas accumulate and fill in all the gaps until eventually there are no minutes and there is nothing but the end of time. And whether or not the sheet can stay so peacefully and so protectively in the air above us won't matter because the dreams will end and the colors will end and the eyes that look upon us will be all that's left of us forever.