In this SPAM Cut, Iramisha Caga writes an elliptical, lyric response to Aurelia Guo’s ‘Alive Pain For A Daughter’, recently published in Erotoplasty 4.
> Aurelia Guo and what she said when she could, when they died and when she knew she was 50/50 mother and father. The afterword.
> Aurelia Guo, this poem. She is sewing fragments of trauma into writing, hers and theirs: both women aged twenty-eight or forty-five.
> These stories, if you dare to read them as such, are in the open now and linked. If you read on you’ll know it’s considered monstrous to be apart, to be dead and past.
> ‘Alive’, ‘Pain For A Daughter’: these are the titles. Then, a header re-states Alive, as if to confirm there is such a term, such a mode of being. Varying typeface throughout reveals there are fractions: it’s not one single voice and not one single truth being introduced. Seams of details open up.
> She is described as living as an avatar to Sexton’s desire. Perhaps writing out, performing the confessional whilst under guidance. It may be fantasies for the other that eclipse in shared pain: pronounced and noted, collected at last.
Bad things happen to pretty blondes with no parents. I thought Grimm’s fairy tales were written for children, as warnings.
Not heard, not seen, featured misunderstandings spell disappointment over what the adults knew, what kids couldn’t do, what was done to them.
> In one instance in the poem she outlines boundaries that are in place right now.
In this saga they are signals of power.
~
Text: Iramisha Caga
Image: Maria Sledmere
Published 5/8/19