Untitled (Phrenology Box)

Kirsten Kaschock

Maybe even the galaxy is holistic.

Then there’s the split between

beauty and reality. There’s the fault line

dividing them and threads that traverse it.

There are the large women with thunderbolt

needles and the smaller figures single-

filing it, ant-ish, across high voltage ropes.

There is the chasm and faces

haunting its waters in funhouse cut-out.

An ocean obliviates and it is mirror. A bed opens

into open field, its emptied bottles smashed

: sharp sheets of blue star. There’s a feeling

—constriction at the heart of the throat

which is, you recall, the serpent first limbs con-

verged around. There’s the wit some have

that we are passages. There’s reasons

the objects must encounter me through windows

they make in themselves. There is that hard way

daughters have of choosing then reshaping

their mothers. There’s voice. There’s de-

formation. Sudden torque and the slow

undo before song is granted. And sometimes

knot. Twine. The divine is in fact all there

is, the debased—the humming between.

(Betye Saar)