Monday, August 10, 2015

Abridged Zero - 47: A Many Splintered Thing

I had a poem published in Abridged Zero Magazine which accompanied an exhibition at Void Gallery in Derry, 'A Many Splintered Thing.' The below poem, which is untitled accompanies a photo by Irena Popova from her series Anfisa's Family.

'I can deal with none of this,
Yet….If I can bear it a while longer,
I will hear her soul.'

Needles to say I am very excited about this opportunity. I found the paragraph for the open call wonderful and a delight to be able to respond to. Here it is below:

Love is a Many Splintered Thing – Andrew Eldritch
“while everywhere love is breathing draftily” – Frank O’Hara
'Our sense of love is conjured vaguely in our sleep, without sound or alphabet, by the mixing of smells of our particular detergent, of breakfast crumbs, of tired bodies in tired bedsheets. Its potent moments are dissolved into our days and disseminated among the many, becoming the domestic dust that falls and fills the little crevices of our existence. The constant expansion of time drags against the climactic instants of love and their fullness. We are not accustomed to complete fullness, and do not have the capacity to sustain it. Love therefore must splinter into our long quotidian days. We must fluctuate lest we are to die from love and its devastating totality. We must choose to erupt with its moments, or to survive by allowing it to splinter and fray like a twisting rope. You will find it in your pocket like lint – it is the gunk in the cracks between the things we are sure of seeing, the gunk between the senses. You could call it love when you find yourself picking parts of another person from your skin, particles that have been wedged into your pores like soil or grime under your fingernails. It is the still morning light that bleaches our senses so we can really see the pimpled mossy stuff of love in its stark mundanity. Love is the nesting of a self within another, when duality glints into oneness. It is a closing in. We move closer and closer to the truth, and the inevitable falsities which become the essential truths. We move closer and closer until we cannot see wholes but only splintering fragments.'
To view the PDF online version please click here



Abridged were kind enough to send me two copies of the magazine, one for me and one to share! But the covers are different, how ever shall I choose!



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