Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics (Issue 25, January 2013—Feminist Issue)
  1. The writing is not the catharsis. The decision to excavate is the catharsis. The transformation from dreadfulness to art is the catharsis, but the art is the art.
  2. I’m saving it for the art is why. This is manifesto is why. Let’s just say fugue-worthy.
  3. I am not averse to working on myself in my art.
  4. I want to make explosions in the air like Cai-Guo Quiang, except with letters.
  5. Undoing the impulse to know the self through mind to instead learn the self through mortification.
  6. Ana Mendieta does bloody and visceral and elemental things. She took her body and put it everywhere. She took her sex and put it everywhere. She bruised the earth with slits.
  7. Ana Mendieta: the empire at the end of decadence.
  8. Because her art is ephemeral, it gets recorded. Even the body, ephemeral, gets recorded.
  9. Prescience.
  10. To make something more of our traces. To garland the trees with clots of me.
  11. But here, covered by the earth whose prisoner I am, I feel death palpitating underneath the earth.
  12. The shame is there, but I’m not shamed or ashamed. The grander the failure, the more elaborate the word-shrine.
  13. Off the leash.