Be Like The Water

Degas girl, Schiele girl

People often ask her if she is a ballerina. She tells them yes, she dances.

A man once leaned out of his car and told her she was painted by Degas. A John sent her a book of Schiele and signed it, he would have died to paint you.

She dreams a lot. Remembers every detail. She wakes up exhausted: her lover found a miniature eagle in her ear and let it go like a child losing a balloon. In another, a man had kidnapped her in his car and a weathered, spooky doll fell down from the roof between them and told her, in harsh whispers, how to kill him to free herself. The spirit inside the doll was a woman this man had murdered. He couldn't see or hear the doll. She ran from the car on gravel that changed to sand and the beach was safety. She was afraid of what the doll was going to do to the man. When she woke up she made her own doll. She burned incense to thank the murdered woman who helped her escape her nightmare.

People often ask her if she is a ballerina. She tells them yes, she dances. Friends have called her stripper, hooker, whore, and she answers, yes, she dances. All the same to her- ring around her life, scars and pockets full of secrets, preciously lived experiences. She is the richest of them all.

Her therapist says she is a baby witch who won't accept that she can't yet play with her mother's cauldron. She keeps burning her hands She needs to be like a tree in the storm, never resisting the sway or the shock.

She heard the chirping of finches and mourning doves outside of her window that night that turned into morning with her lover holding his fist above her face, threatening to bring it down, hard. She remembers being a child and feeling so happy she was a girl.

Chrysalis: What are you becoming in darkness?

Fourth morning after pill in less than a year. She says, this can't be good for you. Good for who? Ok, sure. Let's shuffle the deck and throw it out the window. Let's move into a palace made of aces and fools and fuck against the walls. Let's slide down the pole of transformation. How many he's can she survive, she asked my sister. Green eyes and ptsd. This other one: dreams of stepping on his dirty needles. And another one: paranoid schizophrenic, mad-man archetype. I tell her I like a certain aesthetic: girls morphing into hideous insects, kissing in front of Guernica- the perfect ratio of beauty and taboo and visceral, like snorting valium off a scratched record before fucking in his dirty bed, his feral pitbull licking the sweat off my neck and I keep thinking, is he going to bite my throat open, is the sun going to come up soon, are the birds singing to me- she says I get too close to danger. She says she dreamt of me spinning and spinning in my old tulle skirts and she wanted to dance, but she was tired of trying to be like me. She says we were in the falling tower, an old growth tree, the biggest in history. We lived on the thirty third floor and you could lean into the middle and see all the way to the bottom. She said I sat by a pond and pulled out a beautiful koi and held it up in front of her. She said she told me to put it back. She said, you are going to hurt it (you) can't breathe for long. She said I laughed, stubborn as a child and kissed it on its mouth. She started to cry. Finally, I let it go and when it swam away, she saw it had transformed, half woman. She was amazed. She said I said see, I told you so, I know what I am doing.

Whore Revelations by Leslie Bull

whore revelation 21:8 -ode to deer woman-by Leslie Bull

nameless scared feelings
writing in bibles
visiting prison
placing her name
in your holy book.
the thrill of fear
motel 6
room 257
i want to be 254
cause it rhymes with more
yet 7
rhymes with heaven
and i am
after all, desecrating
a bible
as i write
the holy bible
containing old
and new testaments
translated out of the
original tongue
commonly known
as the authorized
(king james)
version
with quotes in 27
languages
read by
3/4ths of the world's
population
they say
in the cover
alongside
the page for help
in time of need.
i need.
need you
to stop threatening me
with your lakes of fire.

i swim in lakes
and they found my sister
dead in a river,
but a lake
of fire?
no. my lakes
are wet
moist and cool
teaming with life
and death
but not by fire
or your puny god
not by your pale hands.
i've kicked you sideways
upside the head
with my sharp heels
my pointed hooves
kick, kick
back out of
the car
splayed on cement.
truth is, i got away.


-The last verse refers to the time she escaped a serial killer. Read below for the story. Click images to enlarge.








You used to be able to buy Leslie Bull's zines online at eminism.org, but now her link is disabled. If anyone is interested in purchasing her work, let me know and I will holler at her and find out where it's being sold these days. Her zines are amazing.

mystery

Just when you think you have found every enchanted place there is in a city, you meet Simeon and his saints and his house of wood. He shows you his antique lamps and his family portraits and his great mystic talent passed down unchanged, dot for holy dot, through six hundred years of painting. His family even made icons for Ivan the Terrible, he says. His black prayer robe hangs on a thick nail on the door and the wood takes you back in time to his childhood in a Siberian wildnerness and his manhood in a Gulag nightmare and his now in a small haunted house under a bridge where he lives with his lover David and his cats and his holy iconas. His eyes are wild and his stream of consciousness insults and visions are a Russian/English mix of perfect old country bite.

"Who? Putin? He is a bullshit. He is religious like a kitchen sink. He would steal the Jesus from the cross and come back for the nose later. He eats fingernails for breakfast."

He talks of a weeping, healing Icon that literally ran out of her holy alcove when she heard that Putin was coming to visit. He tells you about every saint and every miracle and every torture.

"Who do you pray to? What saints do you pray to? Ah, yes, I know, Saint Paraskeva, she is calling you. She was beaten and burned and poisoned and even had her underarms cut open and still prevailed. Finally, she was decapitated. Yes, I will paint her for you."

He digs through a garbage bag full of sketches on yellowing tracing paper. He shows you the one he wants for you. He tells you his head holds centuries of stories and when he goes, they are gone forever. Will you write them down for him? He says he cannot find an apprentice to pass all of this on to. He wipes the sweat off his forehead with a kerchief. He looks at his wall of icons and holy books and the room smells of dust and frankincense and there is cat hair on your stockings and you are looking up at him from your seat on the floor and he says, this is the most vast desert you can cross, the desert of your mind. Many devils live there. He gives you a hairband covered with feathers.

"Here," he says, hugging you tight and showing you out the door and through the rock garden watched over by a big stone Confucius, "here, I don't need it. It is something pretty for your hair." You thank him over and over again and he says, "Oh knock it off." You wish you could freeze time for him like he has for you.

everywhere

There's no mystery to it: the bricks and the gossip, the nicotine, the exhaust, the aluminum siding.

On the corner the girls come and go, never talking of Michaelangelo. It's all "mirror, mirror in my purse," tell me I am hotter than her. Tell me who fucked who. Tell me it is worth it- the tanning, the sephora foundation and layers of hiding, the five hundred dollar dresses and the fuck-me shoes. Tell me none of it will catch up with me. Tell me he loves me and loves no other and writes songs about me because I shall never write my own. Tell her, you tell her, that bitch, that the flimsy existence he allows me with his gaze is worth fighting for, is worth bickering for on the corner, like a couple of the Pharoah's concubines, the girls come and go, talking shit. There is nothing enduring in this quick-shift of loyalties and faces and foe. She has nowhere else to go, nothing else in her world. The orbit is short and the circles are smoke.

There's no mystery to it.

I escape into the dirty woods by the river sick with city and I find a shelter someone has built out of branches and tarp. I watch the city from across the water and I am so high and happy and alone, but I know what's waiting once I cross the bridge. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors. There's no mystery to it, but here- a spider with orange legs is crawling across the face of my self-portrait. Here, there's rabbit fur and bones and an old rusty knife. Human shit and toilet paper. What wild man lives here? What happened on the other side to drive him crazy?

All weekend in the mountains with my lovers: mountain laurel, rhododendron, and juniper. The smell of wet earth after a storm. A medicine wheel someone made of stones big enough to lay across. Vaginal crevices in the trunks of ancient trees. Rainbow trout swimming with me, naked, nibbling on my toes. Nobody around. Nobody to figure out or forgive or worry about hurting. Butterflies between my legs, their wings touching my thighs. Everything coming to me, recognizing me as essentially good. I gather bones in a basket and take them back with me.

To the city. The drama. The right angles. The billboards, the signs: dreams deferred die here. Mystery?

E, they call him Mother, paints icons, strictly continuing an ancestral tradition over six hundred years old. I've heard of him, his studio, his beard, his madness, and saints. I've heard how he trekks into the mountains to pick the plants to make his paints with. Tomorrow I will meet him for tea and he will show me his sacred hall of icons and I will pretend he's Dostoyevsky for a day and he will say, hey, lovely girl, who's your saint?

Philomena, full of holes, tied to a tree. Or better yet, me, wearing thick skin and a skirt of ginkgo leaves.

River Ritual: Forget

It started out as Forgive, then transformed itself mid-making. (Broken beer bottle glass, rusty nails, rusty hinges, bottle caps.)

Over and over again.

I can't get enough of this song. Guess I'm never the only one feeling this way. Guess girls been doing it since the beginning.



Lyrics:

where are we?
what the hell is going on?
the dust has only just begun to form
crop circles in the carpet
sinking feeling

spin me round again
and rub my eyes,
this can't be happening
when busy streets a mess with people
would stop to hold their heads heavy

hide and seek
trains and sewing machines
all those years
they were here first

oily marks appear on walls
where pleasure moments hung before the takeover,
the sweeping insensitivity of this still life

hide and seek
trains and sewing machines (oh, you won't catch me around here)
blood and tears (hearts)
they were here first

Mmmm whatcha say,
Mmm that you only meant well?
well of course you did
Mmmm whatcha say,
Mmmm that it's all for the best?
of course it is
Mmmm whatcha say?
Mmmm that it's just what we need
you decided this
whatcha say?
Mmmm what did she say?

ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut outs
speak no feeling no I don't believe you
you don't care a bit,
you don't care a bit

(hide and seek)
ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut outs

(hide and seek)
speak no feeling no i don't believe you
you don't care a bit,
you don't care a (you don't care a) bit

(hide and seek)
oh no, you don't care a bit
oh no, you don't care a bit

(hide and seek)
oh no, you don't care a bit
you don't care a bit
you don't care a bit