print previewback AARON APPS
from Dear Herculine
***
My own childhood is similarly textured like menstruation.
Thick.
Raw. Blackening. The rotten grapefruit exploded in the ditch and the teeth of the dogs that lick at it. But I do not have letters to hide in, so I simply tumble in sticks and mud. I do not read. My body in a filth storm, strange. But I too retreat into the woods, and temper myself with animal. In the sweaty heat—In Florida—there are snakes and coconuts. Creaturely. And they have their own genital meaning. Their slick, writhing bodies, clear fluid and crisp white flesh cracked open can-like under machetes.
The fluid everywhere leaking.
Reading history—you as a child until you became a schoolmistress, me as a history student still finding my grip in the mud—and it seems to give us both a kind of authority, it seems to give us an explanation of the structures of social life.