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Imaginary Birds


On the red-checked tablecloth in a clapboard house somewhere in the middle of your country: a china white saucer of butter and rye crackers, muddy lettuce, still-warm bread, a cluster of beers and some water that you're sure is drinkable despite the reddish grit. Here you will eat and drink with your hands straight from containers, and with eating comes talking. You will make walls with words; you will build up this little cell.

Some of you will leave, break through the walls to build more in someone else's country, uninvited and entirely necessary. You will bring tablets to make the water drinkable, pieces of printed paper to explain your theories; scrawl pictures in the dust when words become too heavy in the mouth. You will wipe soot from leaves, soak oil from birds. You will weave shelters from torn branches with ends still weeping sap. You will build things up for others to break down.

Some of you will stay, grow the walls and the people behind them. You will crowd around this thing you all made, this baby raised by committee. Some of you will forget, even just for a moment, whose belly she came from – who made her guts and voice, each toe and eyelash – and maybe in that moment you will even think that she is yours. You will smile to think that you made this tiny perfect object grasping her fists in the middle of the table – to think that you could create this from your body! And you will remember, after that moment, that you did not. All you made was this table, and this meal, and these walls, which after all are made of nothing but words.

~

words: Kirsty Logan, Scotland (blog / Fractured West)
image: 'or is it 6' - Benzo Harris, Scotland (website)

~

another community house: The Warehouse (#15)


 
   

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BluePrintReview - issue 24 - micro cosmos
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