The Unlovely Eater

By Hannah Brown

This piece is part of Love-letters, a collection of digital works collated by guest curator Jess Hewett. Love-letters considers the possibility of love-letters as a mode of online writing that can escape problems of solipsism in girlblogging. This release offers love-letters as a collaborative assemblage of desire beyond any one given subject, dwelling on Deleuze’s provocation that “all writing is a love-letter”.

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hannah brown is an art history PhD student working on queer performance art, trash and garbage, and images that move on screen <3 their instagram is @prescienceenjoyer and they keep a movie diary on letterboxd @sisterwoman85

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the code beguiled down to a hot knife pricks a hole in the ouroboros and for the first time a field of difference receding back, a figure in the distance seeing herself seeing

difference was the first feeling

difference was the endless search for the organ

difference spit-roasted our romantic tongue

inscribed on the picture plane all this heaven-wire coming down, the sugar spun out to the stars a horse kneel’d down before a house that burns for a hundred years

I took a long look down there

where another day ran under this one

flitting between trees

I saw it just now

one

the next

now another

I had heard about a boy delivering his master’s letters to a woman in a country house where the only coherence was grafted after the fact by a technology choked by terrible reeds on the banks of Hebrus’ stream

in this country house a constellation of feathers falling from the ceiling and scuffed marionettes and molding pears like bubbling sea foam along a wood table bent in two and a cobwebbed boar’s head studded awry and chipped

the letters were about how she was a horrible bitch and things like this

she took to writhing on the floor over them even though they talked only of hating her and hiding thread in her carriage spokes and trysting with her cousins

a boy getting scared stock-still at the doorway

at the bedroom threshold

nape of my neck scraping the ceiling i watched a string of spit run all the way down until it leapt up with a start at its mother’s feet

this mother she was wearing a hay wig she scratched at with a seven inch fingernail, her: what if we all just killed you right now?

and over my wagging tongue, me: right now?

sour smell of piss running hot between grime-black tiles yonder

boy puke dried rot-sweet along the drain

beneath markered arcana her face overcome in the mirror

the boy has to yell down into the ear canal if he wants to be heard above the screaming her hand and her hand and her hand and her hand and her right arm extended out past the body it is the very first time he is not empty-handed

and he rides home with something in hand and like a cow down the slaughterhouse steps his master falls plumb out the first floor window

the narrative was going to neuter itself and I watched a mouse make its way twitching through intestines and flank, a shower of shit and foul water making him chitter and shake dotting the wall and all the way to mine own person

heady in front of thirty heels piled, me: someone stepped in dog shit

from the dark holding something overhead, a stranger: someone stepped in dog shit

sprung up with a mad desire my life set upon me beneath greenwood boughs snake-bit we moan in acrid mud

an image that becomes a window in the anatomy theater and all my intestines shivering in their openness like a wrung rabbit’s neck

the cannibal, the eater, the object that never dissolves, my bones between my teeth you stupid fuck I can be heard over the screaming because I am its condition of possibility

I type on the computer, me: in my field of vision my entrails disappear, I have been gutted by the butcher’s blade by some mad miracle

the wound is a blue-festering, it turns me to green rot for two-hundred years, it generates memory-inventions that come out hot and cool on my bedsheets, it is me and a thing outside me, it is a replacement for something else, it makes me walk around in moth-eaten circles crying below blue parabola, it makes me puke and throw up

before I look back at how the heel of my hand balks at a hot flame see the impress of my teeth where there is no mercy for touch

hear a sound that is piercing and blunting the nape of your neck

I wake up when I think someone will break my legs

after a year and a day, the apparition

at the behest of an unlovely eater they run headlong in the endless search for the organ they find each other because the huntsmen will it and out back a stranger magics a forest with one tree and a thousand mirrors

I see you for the last and first time when you say I for me, when remorse was the first feeling scrabbling on wet-organ rocks, when you had my romantic tongue when I said I for me when my code splintered back to every point of repetition when i got my head dented in by a picture so cantripped I had to choke on the eater bones I had to kneel down by the chuffing horse I got all burnt up by the screaming house fire you couldn’t make me out from Job or any other slough of the flesh made legible by the frame that fixes it

swiveling the threshold you catch something outside and out of sight

the house-proud ghost, the viper annihilated in the differencing field

remember when he used to sit at the supper table and look forward

running right past her he parts her hair

running right past her

and damned if she looks back