Britney

The body question: the body’s imposition—the body’s inquisition

Creative non-fiction class: prompt: “Write a third person profile about yourself.”

“Britney Sharliese Franco (July 8, 1999, open-ended) is currently writing a shudder of a half-poem about a man who terrorized her with intimacy for five years. The secretion, curdled milk straight from her left tit spilled across the page, is nudging her into the classic trichotillomania waltz. St. Vitus style, even with her hands cradling the pencil and college-ruled lines. (She, too, feels like a college-ruled line, although she is unsure of the nature of the curvature.)”

Regress
Negress
Recess

I am wearing a bone from the skull of a goat that a girl I loved one summer gave me.
It hangs from my right earring.
I feel decay itch at my neck in the tradition of a passing intruder’s voice.

Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” for the Nemesisters independent study I am doing with my best friend at school: “…this woman’s prophetic body…By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in…”

I am grateful that they have only attempted to strip me of my platelets, below-the-skin defense line, and have found themselves unable to snatch my “private data” (Carson again), unworthy of the reach. Later in the self-profile, I say: “Regardless of her views on men, “the man problem,” et cetera, their presence in her writing is literal, but first and foremost a representation of the trauma they have lazily sewn up her days with.” I want to befriend this girl and flip through our scrapbook of sheared offenses, anguish family lost to laughter in the absurdity of unknown men. Even the ones we can name are enigmas, only because they are so easy to pick apart and be matched with their predecessors. Remembrance of that card game I used to hate as a kid because every playing card had its identical somewhere; I loved the ones with lost twins…killed off identicals…but every man I meet who thinks I am his lost twin is a copy.

IT IS FUN TO WALK CARELESSLY IN A DEATH ZONE.
HIDE UNDER WATER OR ANYWHERE SO UNDISTURBED YOU FEEL THE JERK OF PLEASURE WHEN AN IDEA COMES.

—Jeenny Holzer

I stand by the implication.

I know my cove. ♦