Forest Murmurs

Dear Sister Split,

It is dark and we are both rounded and elastic. You are looking resplendent in your bifurcated boot. It’s too early for sex but the field is flooded, and we are floating in it. We are mocking and militant, playing Mimetic Mother to each other, always-already-second-guessing.

I put my palm freely on the split machine. I like touching her. She has this butch abjection to her, but I know she’s a diva in secret. She looks on as I bring you my fruitful cups. I take care that the fruit is fully reduced and boiling, ready to be re-enjoyed without thinking of its own production. Your lips cannot help but split from the heat. She likes that.

Our grief collapses inside a paper cup. The traces of our bodies broadly fail to make a case within the empire. You try feeling as much texture as you can, your whole body rubbed against the layer before it can even be laminated. You feel light and hungry, inexplicably weak. Me, I walk through the garden abashed, putting shards with shame into ajar. If feeling is comprising of at least nine rooted autonomic branches, seeds, herbs, fruits, that the surface of language is hiding, I am touching only the resonance of the system. Let myself be fluffed up by its traces.

There is a flirtation to the way that the split machine moves, slow, as if for our eyes alone. The machine wants to split us into forms that even she cannot anticipate. I want to soak her in oil until her smoothness might enfold us. I wouldn’t say I kept my pleasure at a distance only because there is such a pleasure to distance. I have felt it as I make my hand into a besideness. The split machine has no beside, only through.

We strain as the machine comes near, then release as it moves far away again. I like to close my eyes but you keep yours open. I’m jealous that you can look right at the machine like that. When I try, I feel this cold touch on my back. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not a diva who always knows how to bear witness. I struggle to ungrasp you when it is time for us to be split again. The machine holds me heavy, reminds me that I’m dominated by a cockamamie cybernetics that feels like a forever fold in feeling good. Animals can’t eat theory but we can excrete it. You don’t want me to say the word excrete so much.

I try grounding myself in sense. The heft of my skin on the surface of the mucky ground. The bog[ging] of the earth beneath the marks of our questions. Is the gap between the machine and our responses homosocial? Is it gay to respond sufficiently to stimulus?

Your embrace makes the break feel multiple and potent. There is an ease to the dual-control of it, but once we’re split it feels more like a polarity. You feel a gravitational pull to the ground; I feel a pull back up again. I am loose-jointed and jaunty, have to field the obvious notion. Mirroring my grief is the shine of the sharpness. Mirroring the shine is the extra-crispy thing that happens right before. I was not trying to be dominated by the drive for transformation. I was not trying to be dominated at all.

Dear Sister Split,

Touching loosely the rhythms, we accumulated connexions, made momentum in any event. The autonomous collective puts up new stickers over the vanishing glass surface of slow disaster. There are a series of clumsy movements in semipublic contexts that unfold in silence. These activities are not linked to the collective. They are visible only to those listeners lodged inside the vibratory zone. The split narrative of dread is that it compulsive and that it is unaware. Like a deer’s run around the touchy-feely truth, with its cutaneous destination.

This year, you say, the collected gesture will be major. We will be unfolding our need for more resonant relations by putting on a stage-play embedded inside a sacrament. We will be zoning in on the Blush Beast of New York, and the hydraulic structure of her fantasy. We will refuse to be greeted by the wussiness of the wussish witness. We will not be concerned with the cross-gender church that became the state. We will not bother searching for an angle, or for more effective shots on the local news. No, we will be plunged precise and with persistence into the stream with its narrow-gauge, to splash its opacities from surface to face.

Acknowledgments: All language is scavenged and rearranged from Touching Feeling, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Sister Split” takes inspiration from “Sister Spit.”