MYTHMAKING: I AM ALL

(for Lydia Lunch)

by Lorri Jackson

and none

of these things: a woman

a stone, a low keen moan

roaming the mother load, diva

on the receiving edge, a privilege

privy to piles of pathetic pilgrims

praying for the sigh that will lay them

down dead. alabaster babble with a luster

of luscious lust. the rust of a million

useless mouths; I am the prelude

to smooth rudeness, a new spoor

clinging to the door of whoredom

where you jerk to the sameness

of the fixed pout

I sing glass

missing throat, flight of cairo

o ye bride of the dead forgotten

saved in tombs

dancing tattooed thighs

in a rotting world

I am the fetid word, here and herbaceous

fertile as the fall from your flailing feet

polyethylene has nothing on me

the grand harpooness, a spark waiting

to mouth off in tongues the hurry up come

I am not a missive of submissiveness

but a weapon of torrential possibilities

So when you kiss my darkening face

o you lover of leavened needs

you with your warped visions of sameness

your fists of material drivel

don’t say my name for fear

don’t say you know it

for behind the navel is a veil

and once danced with

will leave your vain clutchings with nothing

* * * * *

"Mythmaking: I Am All" is from So What If It's True: From the Notebooks of Lorri Jackson, edited by RW Spryszak and published by Thrice Publishing 2017.

Lorri Jackson died in 1990 at the age of 28. She suffocated after injecting heroin. Some of her powerful work survives and tells her grimy truth without obvious complaint but with merciless accuracy.