2 Mouths

2 Mouths: after Anne Carson and Sharon Kivland

I can’t concentrate. I lie down in the afternoon when I sh/could be working. I lie down like my mother lay down. I thought she’d been sunbathing, until I realised she’d been resting before dying. I used to think she was lazy, lying down when there’s so much to do.

Sharon Kivland tells me* that Anna Freud believes in weaving rather than archaeology.

Shifting layers rather than tunnelling.  She has her loom. I saw that loom, that click and clack, in a museum. Freud became ill for several weeks while analysing his daughter...so much so that he couldn’t go on. He couldn’t tunnel while she wove.

Anne Carson tells me** that ‘Declamation relieves men’s head-congestion’. Plus: snoring, snorting, spitting it out. Then there’s Loud Shouting and Aimless Conversation. There’s clucking and fussing, blood and decapitation. Witchery. Hens still running when decapitated.

She tells me more: ‘When Medusa’s head is cut off by Perseus, Medusa gives birth to a son and a flying horse through her neck.’

I lie down in the afternoon when I sh/could be working. I lie down like my mother lay down.

‘Atilla the Hen’ came from Grantham, a shopkeeper’s daughter.

Ululating /ullalating. What sort of a word is that?

Garrulous, Gargoyle, gargirl, Gorgon, garg: ‘A guttural howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth.’**

 S/trumpets and farting. Unzipped, open-weave, no lining to your curtains. See-through and uncontrolled. Rippling air. Wind blowing through. An uncontrolled outburst of sound.

Two mouths, double-ended.  Ending: what ending? No ending. No end in sight, not self-contained. Un-bounded, disorderly.

Moving, hysteria, un-zipped. Climax, shrieking, hullaballoo...

 Here’s a Door. It’s a control-point.

Silence.

In the kitchen, Father regards his daughter. She wears tight trousers. He says: ‘‘Your vulva is visible.” That is an anatomically correct phrase, so he should declaim it.  

Keeps us quiet for years.

Control what emanates from inside, what leaks out. What bulges.

The leaking vessel.

Mouths, upper and lower: leading to hollow cavities (voids, caves, empty cupboards, vases) surrounded by lips, edges, entered through a tunnel, a neck.

Giving birth out of the tunnel-neck: the jug, the vase, the voice, the lips, the edge, the opening, the voice and noise...legs and hooves pushing up and out.

Hysterectomy: fiddling in the interior, ripping it out and creating a void, ‘remodelling’.  The vacillating, moving womb, the clean house, the empty space. Everything behind something else, neatly hidden in a cupboard whose doors are flush to the wall. Can hardly find the opening.

2 Mouths: after Constance Spry

Constance Spry arranges flowers in a fish-mouthed vase, which sounds Glug-glug when poured-out.

Don’t pour-out. Don’t lie down. (Don’t sunbathe, don’t rest, don’t die.) Keep upright and zipped in case something leaks.

Sprouting flowers. Cut them off. Cut them back, before they engulf all the entrances.

Constance Spry has two mouths and both are stuffed with flowers. She is stopped up. She has a pale green vase and a white vase stuffed with tulle.

All is quiet.

Pause and lean in to listen.

I can hear some groaning.

Always groaning if it’s very quiet. Moaning, and groaning.

I can’t hear/

SSSHHHH...

The ball of cells multiplies: She’s giving birth, out of her flowers, from this double ended mouth-vase. Yes, like a trumpet, or a fornicating tube - the tube where her baby was inseminated and incubated.

Getting louder. Becomes screams.

A horse is born. It stands shaking on its four spindly legs.

Everyone sighs: Aaahhhh.

2 Mouths:  Monster Me

Gorgon, guttural, distended, baggy, open, always open, a door with a mouth, a mouth like a door: shut it, close it, wait please. Thanks. Shush.

I’m here for a small procedure. I’m here for an intervention. I’m here for an incision.

Unwind ourselves now.

We might just fall out, into a huge baggy mouth-mess.

Here.

Stitch it up carefully until it resembles how a mouth should look.

Roll ourselves back up close together.

Nothing noxious

No clinging baby

No bloody stinking drips from a foal (filly or colt) or from flowers.

We are all watery.

It’s no problem.

We can wind ourselves back into ourselves and shear ourselves back up so the shearlings wool is back on her body, and there’s no blood, no stench, no noxiousness.

Nothing to see-hear, no openings sprouting from both ends, no gorgon, no neck-birth, just a neck-lace, a unicorn emoji and a horn sticking from the centre of my head.

From the green vase, and the white vase stuffed with tulle, (flowers placed with great care, plucked from either end and then trimmed until they resemble a bouquet), I throw myself about, writhe from each end and trumpet from both mouths at once, with hooves waving from my neck: like a gorgon, like a garg.

 * Sharon Kivland: Abécédaire, 2022, Moist Books

** Anne Carson: The Gender of Sound, 1992, New Directions