Anchors
From Wallace Issue Zero, written in response to Kristy Luck's work in the Hammer Museum's Made in LA 2025
A clock without hands leans on my window where it can be silent and right. Watching the moon. Obscene. Prayer turns your tongue into a flashlight. “Sumptuous” comes to mind. Sumptuous stays. I love sumptuous. My sister is a singer and I cry when she sings. It is only through her songs that I know her. Pearl with Cream in the Dirt. I’ve learned what things are made of. My seven-year-old: A bitch in a white tennis skirt. A boy, around age twelve, missed a train by seconds. His entire family sat on board. The train began moving. I watched him run alongside, begging to be let on. His round face pure red. I thought, “Someone should really stop this.” Everyday of her life, my mother spread her legs towards the hot sun. At night, she slept on a small green couch facing her dusty bed. Holding my hair to my mouth, and then my ear, I say “softness is as softness does.” Running a thumbnail over its length, I hear the faintest voice, and so I whisper again and again. “Softness is as softness does.” “Softness is as softness does.” I’m very close to and very far from the universe I once was. Balancing on her two pink knees.
