PAPER MILK
The written develops when
calcium brings life to ink; letters are collagen of thoughts. A newborn alphabet cries its vowels and the
page will nourish them: a opens into
a u, u becomes a tiny cup, fills with the milk of paper; the e, too, unfurls to an o and nurses on the colostrum of
pulp—thought attaches sound from oral when put on a thin sheet of white. Form, a structure of feeling, with an
instrument of print, means to foster language—verso and recto will be the
caretakers of our vernacular, our infant text.
QUIETUS
The zero is not a circle; it’s an empty clock. And the clock is an o which rolls to the other side of the
page. But the c stuck between the b and
d eats itself and the page will taste how desperate language is. If you peel a sheet of paper, you will find
letters who have eaten themselves: the
a who chewed itself until it became a dot on paper and the z who ingested
itself until it was a tiny line on a page.
Within the white spaces they have become inklings, miniature dark
skulls, and black specks on paper. But
they still move like the tiniest gears in a clock. And their bones are scattered like dry grains of ink on a white
sheet. I think of their deaths: the stiff face of a choked letter, the
broken jaw of an e, the throat of an f slit open, an i swallowed up to its
torso, the dot bitten from a j, the letters of a sentence removed with teeth;
and a sentence dipped in bleach until it becomes a skeleton, the bones thinning
into calcium, the sockets of the skull discoloring into pale ink. And you will hurt it more if you try to slip
its bones back through the flesh of ink or dress it back into its dry black
clothes. So let the lower case i be a
body under the dot: a naked letter on
the page.
UNWRITTEN
Enough to reveal part of
what covers a skull, to scrape out its ink with a trowel: a loop of an
unfinished alphabet, a C bent to an incomplete circle. Language is not vacant only quiet and
nameless, unwritten in the depths of the page, an unclothed sound. Excavate an O to remove its tiny white
cranium; within text there is extinction, the bone-shaped artifact. See the skeleton of a head, how it grinned,
how the teeth of its sentence clenched until it chipped a piece of a
letter? You will dig the rest of its
design from the layered page, chip at its body until the bone is exposed; fold
the paper in half, in that moment you will feel it separate from its form. Chart the dark structure of its bones, the
framework of a letter is only a body bag; within the page, that is where the
calcium hardens.