[notes from a possession]
I used to talk to god everyday, now I can’t even look at him
I’m back to writing my own prayers, like a child with red index cards from school, I use
the trees in my rituals, the icons are too painful, the icons cut, my prayers are
a knife I’m
not sure who I’ll use
them on
the conspiracy around my possession is rampant
she looked at me, a revelation
*
The dictionary chooses, to illustrate an example of possession, a sofa—that one can possess a sofa. This is interesting to me because the word for sit is at the root of possession: to be able or capable of sitting—that is, occupy, hold. A way to lay claim to something is to strangle it, inhabit it. I think of the Roman custom of claiming paternity—sitting a child on your knee. (The Latin gen for knee is the root of genuine.) These concepts like most concepts do come from some strange rite of our bodies. Which have a way of being literal.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English language was possessed by ideas before it was possessed by demons
Can possess be intransitive—that is, can you possess no object
*
What’s the relationship between my performance and my possession
*
a door opens onto another door
the birds fly out of the woman, the birds fly out of the mother, her halo is almost
gone, her hair instead feathered with white, a design
the image is in slo mo but my soundtrack is in real time, don’t try to deconstruct the
dream, but its
friction is in that rough edge
how many bed frames, water in slow motion. A black & white dream. Day moves quickly
in this time,
is this a screenplay, a meme of memory
*
“The body’s numbness precedes the spirit’s.”—Etel Adnan, Premonition (29)
*
I lay on a table, under a white sheet, in a room that was half-open to the forest. A hummingbird flew in and pierced its beak through my palm.
*
I am unsure whether the possession is taking over me or over this sentence / meanwhile,
I’m trying to exert some control
*
Possession is an outmoded form of love, possession is uncouth as a decision-making process, possession is ambivalent, one minute an animal, one minute an automaton, it’s tedious.
*
the hummingbird tried to drink from the flowers on my hair scarf while I wrote a sentence,
its wings batted my cheeks, I felt, for the rest of the day, a periodic uttering in my
ear, as if the wings were throbbing against the walls of my inner shell / In the late
morning it actually lit within me a small seizure
*
their holiness pathologizes my animal, tired but beating / opened by the serenity of a
distant star, near
the gas station
There are other animals of my species categorized by how we touch / we love by a fierce
perimeter
My body extends, like a ray or tree, I have a starting point and no end, this image has no
physics, it’s
impossible
*
I want to come home, back from the dead / I want to read guides written by others
She washes up close to me, with my face, floating like an apple / She says that I can build
a city on the
water / and she has a little journal
we touch in close lightning / contracted in a blue shock at the fingertip
The girl who looks like me / is afraid of reading unsupervised / the girl who looks like
me / doesn’t
think that god likes her music
Ella Longpre is an author (How to Keep You Alive, 2017), musician, and low-fi mixed media performance artist who is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. She can be found in the woods. www.ellalongpre.tumblr.com/