A Thing Like You and Me is a multi-authored Narrative in Progress which evolves every month with new instalments by artists, poets, writers, and activists. A Thing Like You and is edited by Sarah Crewe and Dimitra Ioannou. The contributors explore the guidelines for A Thing Like You and Me which are largely based on Hito Steyerl’s homonymous essay. You can read them here.
5.25.2016
I have no idea what eggnog is
by Nana Sachini
5.16.2016
Wishes
by Shelagh Rowan-Legg
5.11.2016
1,2,3
by Liliana Vaques
5.5.2016
Priest/ess VI
by j/j hastain
“It’s how you bloom,” she says, referring to the evening before, when, at dusk, she pulled over by the storm-sloughed lake urgently in response to an intense response in me—response as if I needed to throw up. The lake was presenting like a sea with its independence and growls, behind me as I was clasping my hands tight around my face and mouth. The clasp was so tight someone might have misread it as another’s hands capturing me, shoving me around, being rough with me.
“It feels good when you scream?” She asks.
“No. The screaming hurts. What feels good is you coming immediately to me in response to what it is that is hurting me.”
She holds me tight to her. We are rocking together. Into each other’s faces we sing: “Calling all angels. Walk me through this one don’t leave me alone. [] And if you could do you think you would change it all? All the pain and suffering. But then you’d miss the beauty of the light upon the surf and the sweetness of it leaving.” Tears in my eyes. Tears in her eyes. Our tears mixing. Our voices mixed.
“I’ve got you sweetheart. Feel your body.” My voice is all screamed out. My body is quivering.
Later, she tells me how she can feel that in those moments I am doing what needs to be done in me (screaming me into my body) in order for me to be with her in form. This is absolutely correct. Much better of a response than being thought by my lover to be crazy.
Then she tells me how she loves being the instigator and deliverer of my orgasms: another kind of scream in which I need her, depend on her. I realize the scream at the lake as the scream of star cells: deeply in need of deliverance. I realize the scream of her courtship of my orgasms as the Beloved conjuring somatic order: the experience of having been delivered.
Now I am thinking of the guy at my work who responded to the Rafflesia Arnoldii blossom on my desktop (I wish I could have an actual Rafflesia on my desk at work! Then folks would be so disturbed by the smell of rotting flesh there, on my desk, they would stop complaining about the gnats in my plants—gnats that are there because some asshole threw the still-living plants into the garbage (not where they belong)). The guy at my work says “Gross!” pointing to the image of the carrion flower. His eyes are bugging out. He is sweating from the feral floral, terrified. He is playing out a future scene in Little Shop of Horrors when his very manhood, his stubbly chin and his dick will be eaten by this pulsing plant.
I suppose people are afraid to bed in the field of Rafflesia. But if you are like me, and your lover recognizes that smell, the hearty musk, the scream as indicative of the miracle of fringe life, if you are me and can feel blood stirring in the sky or a carrion flower as a form of paradise, then you know Rafflesia fields are precisely where to bed. As the lovers kiss while they fuck in the Rafflesia field they taste another beings’ blood, iron, cum in their mouths.
So, if you feel a sharp edge tickling your feet, trying to make contact with you, please don’t kick it! It is your kick of it that will cut your feet. It is possible to caress an edge. It is within your power to coddle and cuddle something hard until it presents soft.
The woman’s scream is ages old; it is meant for you in the moment that you hear it. Take responsibility for it, please—meet it by whatever means necessary. It is a gift for you. Rafflesia Arnoldii don’t just bloom up anywhere. That’s why I can’t have one at my desk at work. Carrion flowers grow in the rare. It is their nature to rouse and ream the ridge. This is natural roost. The petals poke has been long washed out by cliché. It is time for that to change. The petal’s poke is in fact a rarified state.
The prism’s pounce perceives it.
5.4.2016
Anti-Muse VI
by Navine G. Khan-Dossos
aglimpseof.net 