icarus,
by alloe mak
editors: elim chan, liam mason, killian mak
and even icarus could not understand how it burns to be a woman.
for he may be tragedy; paradoxical awe found in hubris, vanity, but he is that eternal muse—shameful addictive beauty even in his crime.
oh,
icarus.
i wish to have fallen on your sword. for icarus, i have fallen—but icarus, i have been ripped to shreds by the hands of my own sons.
icarus, could you even fathom what it means for your soul to fall from the sky, not to be caught by the love of masses below?
Mother!
Mother!
the blood will not stop dripping onto my once unsullied school shoes.
Mother, i am blamed.
Mother, i did not sin.
Mother, i long for consecration—i long for icarus. i dream of the author who, as both witness and guarantor, infinitely withdrawn from truthful physicality, might put me into play as a gesture; irrevocably and without reserve.
in the way, you, icarus, are penned by thousands of poets—i implore you—play with my eternal turning of a page which might render me infinite—
even for a moment—
even at the risk that my happiness or disgrace will be decided with certainty once and for all.
for icarus, in your infamy and disrepute, never are you possessed, never represented, never said. you stand on the threshold of text—reach out from the ignominy of death despite that descent demanded by deities.
your absence is marked on the outer edge of every archive—a gesture that has both rendered its possibility but exceeded and nullified its intention.
you have given to be known—the most drastic abbreviation—yet the gesture by which you have been fixed seems to have removed you forever from any possible presentation; as if you have appeared in language only on the condition of remaining absolutely unexpressed in it.
icarus, you will never know.
you may be mortal, but Man is God.
you are written by pious pens; drawn by adoring poets.
let me be had and held in language like you are—not in this perpetual pain, not in this body—but only in that moment of disappearance.
through denial of use, render me pure—never to be possessed as property; incapable to profane.
icarus, you may have belonged to the gods, but in praise of profanation, in attempt to fair femininity, let me employ you into free use and markets of men.
for icarus, when i think of you, i dream. i conceive not in thoughts but in prayers; enthralled with waxen wings which burn my skin. you singe my face as tears; pangs and torn heartstrings as i imagine how you might have cried as you felt that first lurch of your stomach; vicarious fear on your behalf.
but i pity that such illusion is false sorrow; this desire is selfish longing and poorly concealed jealousy. in necessary spite and liberatory revenge,
be penned for once like Helen.
be penned like all our mothers and daughters—be sold, be held in lien; be given for usufruct, and burdened by servitude.
be forcefully freed of your sacred names imposed upon your unworthy, flattened chest.
feel the cæsura1—cross the threshhold as every victim must. cross it backwards, the way you never have before.
in ludus and iocus2, i drop the myth and preserve the rite. in the commodity, become ungraspable fetish. icarus, can your author save you now? woman is absolute profanation without remainder; equally vacuous and total consecration. all you do, all that is done, all that is experienced; this sphere of consumption swallows it whole.
and when i have finished with you, naked on the covers, i will carve you out of marble and shamelessly display that same addictive beauty in every Museum.
the exhibition of impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing.
inoperative waste of space.
do you feel infinitely frozen? can you even breathe?
can you conceptualize this iniquitous eternity? perpetual infringement on body and soul? irrevocable loss of all use; absolute impossibility of even profaning once more. a plaything who has lost all amusement—a means without an end.
relish in the injustice!
cry for lack of hope!
icarus, we may call for our mothers, but know our marble lips are stone.
icarus, my legs are sore—
god, that you can fly—?!
i flail my limbs—this insulting show—humiliating performance of breath.
icarus, do you fail to see that my fall has doomed us both?
this tomb is more than fit for two—why not dig me from below?
though you put me here yourself, dug the dirt with your unsullied hands, i cry at the betrayal—not of burial or condemnation—but the fact that you did not jump with me,
and still leave me here alone.
icarus, do you feel the pain i feel? do you know now what i know?
icarus, you flew to touch the gods, but i flew to imagine Man.
the dirt is soft. the air is warm. i am wrung like a cloth by my neck.
Mother, this womb.
Mother,
mother.
Mother!
icarus, i cannot breathe!
- a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins—a gap inbetween two spheres; between sacred and profane; divine and human.
↩︎ - latin phrases; playing with things in literature breaks up this unity in things are both myth and physical. as ludus (physical play) it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus (a joke, jest a form of amusement, or wordplay) it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive. ↩︎