{"id":5714,"date":"2020-03-02T11:06:57","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T11:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=5714"},"modified":"2020-03-02T11:06:57","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T11:06:57","slug":"dorothy-lehane-house-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/5714\/dorothy-lehane-house-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorothy Lehane: House Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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the intersection where voyeurism\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

meets the sick-fugue<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we must unplug ourselves<\/p>\n

unconscious at delta<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we met in a sick building<\/p>\n

trouble all over the face<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the men gathered and tweezed the blood fluke<\/p>\n

from the house girl\u2019s throat<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the cat performed a protective function<\/p>\n

soaked up the gamma, theta, delta<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

it will be years before I understand<\/p>\n

how to redress the failures<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

at the bridge at Waterman\u2019s quarter<\/p>\n

we were warned<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the war is not in the air<\/p>\n

it is deep in our bone marrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

downstream. in the reeds<\/p>\n

careless with our bodies<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

weeping & welting<\/p>\n

it was a turning on myself<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

an unworlding of heartache<\/p>\n

an ending of gestural life<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a Spinozian view of being a<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

maternal substance<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

sex drive as a pathology of empty phrases<\/p>\n

love, what foul play<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

so impish and unrelenting<\/p>\n

I was your girl but only with mannerisms<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

what do we hold in our bodies<\/p>\n

so many sick hearts<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

let noise emerge from hardship<\/p>\n

little house-girl<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

collapsed on one side<\/p>\n

you can\u2019t get out of the disease state<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

unless you have lived in it<\/p>\n

pulse therapy for the house girl<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in the absence of remission<\/p>\n

organise the body according to the pluralist culture<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a pretty demon<\/p>\n

enters the house-girl<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

unprepared and exhausted<\/p>\n

with socio-spatial anxieties<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

with a heavy jaw, & heft word play<\/p>\n

it isn’t a secret that I feel irrelevant<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

still not dead but catalogued\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

as a patient<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

& feeling irrelevant is a way of staying healthy<\/p>\n

forcibly hunting for what has vanished<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

bearing the mark of the house-girl<\/p>\n

whose epigenetic backtalk is just a perverse tracing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

hewn up from the rehearsal of being in a body<\/p>\n

Outside there is desire & ceremony<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

& they must be acted upon<\/p>\n

the house girl has done the emotional work of ceremony<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

so I can live life in the margins of desire<\/p>\n

the lilies are in my mouth again & I\u2019m ready for seduction<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

everyday I think about the filth of my inquiry<\/p>\n

how to rule my body from her mouth<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

blood-flukes are in her throat again<\/p>\n

& my eyes are falling out<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

to itemise each wallowing<\/p>\n

or push back against the credibility of the linear model<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the house girl is waking at 4am<\/p>\n

with sad lungs and a feeling of impermanence<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that is to say,<\/p>\n

occupying the grief corner<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the uneasy stasis before agency\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

like territories unfolding\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

it is a matter of the finer details, the Eve condition<\/p>\n

the final line when there is no finish line<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

inexhaustible over action & inaction<\/p>\n

in the hope of privileging the body\u2019s double coding<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

abuses in the woman-house<\/p>\n

the knotty apology<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that has failed the female for centuries<\/p>\n

urges her to be self-detached<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

unwounded, the house girl develops<\/p>\n

& recedes. in habitus<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the charm itself is less than stable<\/p>\n

a critical factor is knowledge of the hex<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

couldn\u2019t fit you in the same plot<\/p>\n

yet my mouth is on your shirt<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

at dawn, I am just a sick body<\/p>\n

tracing words to the moment I mouthed them first<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

sero-negative<\/em><\/p>\n

serum tells us nothing except<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we\u2019ll never again wear the clothes<\/p>\n

we wore on diagnosis day<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the event inside favours the complex<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

joints: shoulders and knees<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

at night, the house-girl reads about logic<\/p>\n

to avoid the fallacies of possession<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

how many mouths have mouthed\u00a0change is coming<\/em><\/p>\n

in the hope of forming a new disposition<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

but logic only comes to the non-afflicted<\/p>\n

& else operates in different realms<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the men gather again with their own logic<\/p>\n

tweezers to bone. stoic with the task<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the house girl is stuck down<\/p>\n

I am not sure if she is held<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

or holds herself<\/p>\n

over-coding her screams<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November stretches in both directions<\/p>\n

my health is a forgery but nobody can see it<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

there is hiding the clapper bell<\/p>\n

needles into the Earth\u2019s flesh<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

& needles into the body<\/p>\n

they say:\u00a0try stay safe by separation<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

my brothers give me a Schlag-ruthe<\/p>\n

they already know I\u2019m a water witch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dorothy Lehane\u00a0is the author of four poetry publications:\u00a0Bettbehandlung<\/em>, (Muscaliet Press, 2018),\u00a0Umwelt<\/em>\u00a0(Leafe Press, 2016),\u00a0Ephemeris<\/em>\u00a0(Nine Arches Press, 2014) and\u00a0Places of Articulation<\/em>\u00a0(dancing girl press 2014). She has read her work to audiences at Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne, Ivy Writers, Paris, the Science Museum, the Wellcome Trust, the Barbican, the Roundhouse, BBC Radio Kent, and the Union Chapel, and has contributed on improvised collaborations, notably with synthesizer, Matthew Bourne. Recent poetry and reviews appear in\u00a0Westerly Magazine<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<\/em>Modern Philology.<\/em>\u00a0She is the founding editor of Litmus Publishing and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      the intersection where voyeurism\u00a0 meets the sick-fugue \u00a0   we must unplug ourselves unconscious at delta   we met in a sick building trouble all over the face   the men gathered and tweezed the blood fluke from the house girl\u2019s throat   the cat performed a protective function soaked up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[55,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/skull-for-J-box-5.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1ua","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5714"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5907,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714\/revisions\/5907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}