Last time my heart was open there were two anarchists in a gazebo
one was a pain dealer and I was the stranger (seasickness)
I kept standing on the Pulaski bridge watching two autumn leaves go by,
changing the ontological nature of the world itself. (did I dream you dreamed about me?)
Orange is blue’s spectral opposite, though together they don’t reach the saturation
at the bottom of the river bed. A gazebo is no shelter to the space around my chest. Wow, that’s a lot of silence. Who am I now? Lifted my stomach and dropped it somewhere. Or is all that tenderness gone? Wasted, on blood oranges. A broken collarbone.
Haven’t we known each other since before memory started to burden us? 20/ Kuan: both contemplating and being seen, the eye reaches to be fed. Storm king parallel lines / that must be the saddest view / there is no shelter in a statue. I marked your back with a permanent marker,
like I did when I was little to all the furniture in the new, empty house.
the sun is always in my eyes, at the stupid Chelsea apartment with the neon color lights, I saw the solar eclipse, a little girl skating around a tiny ice rink with her father.
Notes:
“did I dream you dreamed about me?” is from Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil.
“20/ Kuan: both contemplating and being seen” is from the Hexagram 20 of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilheim,
“the sun is always in my eyes” is from Third Eye Blind’s song Motorcycle Drive By.
The sculpture in the image is Gazebo for Two Anarchists, by Gabriella Antolini and Alberto Antolini (1992) on permanent display at Storm King Art Center.
Julia Sáenz Lorduy is an educator, writer and textile artist from Bogotá, Colombia now living in Los Ángeles. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts in May 2022 and was selected a Post Graduate Teaching Fellow for the School of Critical Studies for the class she proposed, feminist text(ile) practices, which she taught in the fall of 2022. She was also the managing editor for the anthology of lust rubber which gathered thesis excerpts from the MFA graduating cohort. Julia’s academic interests are far-reaching, and she is invested in inter- and multi- disciplinary lenses to her teaching, writing, and art making. She completed her bachelor’s at Columbia University with a major in Sociology and a concentration in Mathematics. Since 2021, Julia has been part of a sewing circle that creates textile testimonies of state and gender violence in Bogotá, called Mujeres Haciendo Memoria.