In the desert in Sardinia
After Sebastiane (1976)
The man wearing the least clothing is
sharpening a knife. There are people
on the TV in the gym with infinitely more
fuckable bodies than me. In the rain-wet
faces of the public was a freefall through
a series of white thuds. Someone has to do it.
If you are that would-be jackal two inches off
my lungs or something similarly real, realness
measured in threat, you would understand this.
My beliefs looking at me in the dark -
not horrifying - just expectant. I wanted
to walk off my body or the subjunctive is
not in direct reference to what is necessarily
real but instead actually the new year -
lowercase - and to the embarrassing flagrant back
of me. I search the conversation
on the messaging app for versions of you have
made me proud. In any desert, I have not said
my name. I would be an engine of already
gone, would be of why should I not and
tower over me. To bring on solstice
I have been having in my mouth
crocuses methodised right are breathable
through initially waking something then
no matter that I do not ever behold you
again. Not meaning much I to
accompanying beats.
Back-of-the-neck hairs. It is so offered to me. I do
not remember the taste done with
making life I looked at the career
of an omen no one having
to tell of in the difference
of future from true I forget I fear
that while bent over you
got an eyeful of my heart and
what does not happen anymore
is who were you to look in on
excruciatings in where my no-soul nests
on the other tv channel that
was all we had in the gym no
one put on the bird programme
it did not happen not
one dropping tiredness though all
rawness gone at an end not elsewhere
just done all this for big shoulders less hips
doing all
these associatings and consequentialisings and
when I feel most close to history is when I you
know and I hear a film where the dogs are
heavily breathing
from ‘Medea redux/Hares on the Mountain’
29/03/2020
I have been slumping all mirrors wrong way in against the wall because I have been thinking about what we owe to each other. When I say all talk of sex embarrasses you, it means the pale grit bends to the shape of my clothed knees. I do not take the clothing of my knees lightly so they are clothed lightly in fabric the weaving of which was not a task undertaken lightly the non-lightness of this task was not conceived in light were our children conceived in light
the Internet, pretending, coming, coming,
17/07/2020
I lick cordial off my wrist
to facilitate
of a photo or some other likeness
of you. I will have been admitting
this. What other admission I will publish
the machinations of all my organs
bar some. I am a good dog
in romantic scenery, bad thing.
I would have climbed across a dome of marble
or designer granite second only to the firmament, as if
this dome were a sand dune, to see
where the past thirteen days have gone. When
in every sense but physical you were
wringing your hands, bereft, nobody to
prop you at the [event]’s end, it had me
thirsty in this autumn way,
orange-yellow, conscientious production
of heat, affronting winter. Callas’ Medea
is the inverse of ripple of stone in the hands
after pressing against or slapping.
I hope you come back to your acts of squirreling
away. Callas’ Medea is senseless
and has been making. I was seeing
plagues in my dreams, of insects,
of cruise ships cutting
through land as if scalpels, scraping,
the insects burdensome. Pasolini’s Medea has
no onscreen interaction with gods though
special effects of the time would have allowed for the staging
and what is the meaning of this choice, the apostrophising,
the centaur, the globules of beaded jewellery
in places of apparition, separate union,
voices in the night’s sky. I believed in a factory of
18/07/2020
care and affection. What does it
mean of me in worlds of this shaping
to know song as a function of organs,
biologically, you will be explaining this,
no I will be buoying my song
along knowing I will live
the experience
of ornamental gravel, all those I cannot stand
until I do. I hate when the world gets me so ashamed.
"In the desert in Sardinia is part of my ongoing interest in the poetics of film and the cinema of poetry. Here, I was thinking about the embarrassment and exuberance of looking queerly; about moving images that stare back and these existing along a spectrum of dread and pleasure; the somehow simultaneous anonymity and conspicuousness of going to the gym alone and watching a film alone.
These excerpts are from Medea redux / Hares on the Mountain, a long piece in progress considering the myth of Medea and the English folk song 'Hares on the Mountain', after the Internet. I wanted to distort and ricochet the trope in myth of a woman pursued and transforming who, on running out of transformations, falls (for) a man; to inhabit and take apart the 'I' and 'we' of a text; to devote to the sexlessness, sexuality, and magic of the hare; to orbit Medea in all her unpredictability, pride, and desire for a time; and to somehow mark the temporality of crisis."
Ali Graham lives and works in Norwich. Their poetry has been published by The Tangerine and Datableed, and their essays have been published by SPAM zine and Stride. Their interests include hybridity, lyric essays, folds, and materialities.
Ali can be found on Twitter as A__Graham and Instagram as aligrhm.