Girl as Vandercook 4 Proof Press; This house has many hearts; Now clear your minds—it knows what scares you

Girl as Vandercook 4 Proof Press
diagram of
a face
rollers curve
like cheekbone like
jawline like eyebrow
she traces contours with a palette knife
and blends and blends and blends
metal
as a kind
of bone
bone as
a means
to bend
she presses dampened1 paper soft
against her rigid edges
what’s left of her
kissed-mouth2
smudge
her ink-lipped
smack
oils blot away her clotted red-pinks
like cold cream and water
1. “An advantage of art paper is its increased ability to absorb impression and ink when dampened with water.” (from Letterpress Printing: A manual for modern fine press printers, Paul Maravelas)
2. “Many commercial printers who formerly worked in letterpress will say, however, that ‘the type should kiss the paper.’ They were trained to print with the subtlest of impression in order to preserve the type.” (from Letterpress Printing: A manual for modern fine press printers, Paul Maravelas)
This house has many hearts.
This house has many hearts.
—Poltergeist (1982)
This rope double-knotted around your waist:
tie one end to what you love,
the other to what scares you.
This possession is a splinter
under each of your fingernails,
a nail between each rib-rafter,
your bloodbeat louder
at each entrance wound:
you possessed by a house possessed
by the dead possessed
by your daughter.
All of this hereaftering
in your here and your now:
your own heart hammering
in the walls.
Now clear your minds—it knows what scares you.
Now clear your minds—it knows what scares you.
—Poltergeist (1982)
In your dreams of
a disembodied daughter,
she is blue teleglow,
a bioluminescent voice flung
& flown like fireflies.
She is in the night-arms
of the dead tree outside
your window. You feel her
move through you like moonlight:
so softly, with small cold hands.
And what now? While she’s
spiderwebbed between here
and gone, the orb-weaver is listening
for any disturbance of her silk threads,
any wind-blown cry for mother
caught & clung there.