‘I Cast It Away, My Body:’
— Nix Thérèse
I love when a doubling feels less redundant and more mystic, especially when siblings bend to the same frequency. Yet from outset, we encounter one slowly tapering off the map. The father pulls two ribs and one snaps into angles.
Malleability turns enemy when the bone can’t hold together. I imagine the meat sagging when the break doesn’t come clean, how you’d have to dig—further butchering—in blood to collect the pieces. It breaks the sterile—the waiting room & the breathing tube being pushed from inside feel hushed in comparison. In this sweep, we intimately know the shared body before we further learn how it’s failing. Likewise, despite the prowl that comes in “night panther” and the ample swish of the “dragon tail”, the brother being “copper-horned” and copper feathered brings back tenderness. The shine rings beautifully when fresh, but tarnish can bury its light easily. The color itself already runs so close to rust.
When we encounter the speaker’s heart buried in “soft red clay”, it becomes role reversal, the brother’s flare overtaking the speaker. But the speaker’s never been infallible. Even as they “win”, they acknowledge in war between [them], [they are] losing.
They can’t regain this symbiosis once the brother expires from this plane. Yet they lean into the snapped body that’s abandoned: my body / broke and anchored to this earth a bolt / jettisoned.
It’s painful to watch them fall into the shell of the brother because while they can mirror back their twin, who’s there to hold space for them? What do they maintain once their body is cast? This seems to me the perfect elegy. The voice pitches itself so close to the lost that the spirit keeps running.