Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
You can purchase our Summer issue here.
Diana Al-Hadid, Henry Art Gallery, 2021
I descend the gallery stairs
to the history of women
where my legs are cut off at the knee.
Carved with the knife of ecstasy.
I lie down halved
next to the instrument of my thinking.
Not the bodiless head
but feet, their subduction,
in bronze, polymer, gypsum.
Migration is the story of longing
is the story. To risk
rupture for rapture.
Footprints on the ceiling,
a ladder I tug down
from its primeval coil.
Steel, fiberglass, and copper,
where finish splits from color,
longing is ribless as a scorpion.
Do not fix me to the vanishing
point. I cannot afford to lose
what I cannot possess.
Purchase our Summer 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She has developed writing+movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. Her first book, We Contain Landscapes, is forthcoming with Tin House in 2025.
