etude
lungs of time, they’ve turned into paper beneath fingers that once tore at their own flesh. still damp with seed, they drag their stickiness across the surface. but the pages breathe. they remember themselves as plants, even soaked in human pollen. now they live where the body collapses, and still they refuse grammar.
on them, irises live in their own century of weather, bright and motionless. the house burns down, the petals remain. they hum in ultraviolet; you can almost hear them, a frequency below mourning. fuchsia skin stretched over the pulse of endurance. the paper aches for a former love.
here roots become nerves, sap becomes desire, chlorophyll turns into blood. pages from a world where growth is erotic. ah-ah-ah, the stem trembles, reaching toward consciousness. the root, a body thirsting for light. a tree planted in flesh, a scar sending out branches. pain performs photosynthesis, memory green and alive. nothing ever dies completely; it becomes a root. how can pages survive such transformation.
blackberries explode with time, the blood of summer dark and fermenting. sweetness already rots. we eat mortality. wine spilled by a boy drunk on pollen. a bee crashes into the bud.
pause. breath. a shift of air. a warm rain passes over the garden. the paper hovers, ready to receive another layer of green.
a garden on radioactive stones, moss glowing the color of hope and decay, two shades of the same green. survival as performance – that is creative optimism. learn the alphabet of photosynthesis against extinction. even here we grow, dreaming of meiosis. “we are witnesses,” think the sheets of paper, “we are archives.” the magnolia dense as wine. the oak remembers who once hung from its branch. no sermon, only humidity.
rain. olive. grass. letters choke like soil after a gunshot. pages soaked with a student’s semen say nothing. and the student, illuminated after orgasm, listens to the tulips scream, red wounds in a white room. the flowers accuse him of wanting peace. their color enters his body; their petals are the lips of insistence.
bury your face, obedient boy, in plastic ivy, neon grass, in flowers that never wilt. outside, the city hums like a dead greenhouse, growth replaced by simulation, antique statues frozen in the pose of eternal photosynthesis.
still, even now, something pushes through the asphalt of the sentence. woolf’s fuchsias, lawrence’s sap, morrison’s scar, dickinson’s intoxication, jarman’s moss, faulkner’s oak, plath’s tulips, welsh’s weeds – they all rise through the page, promising not to die for your metaphor. language too grows by photosynthesis. syntax turns silence into breath. every word a leaf trembling toward light. listen: the green voice beneath the human one. it whispers through every book, every lung, every wound. it says nothing ends, everything continues, continues, continues.
oleg olizev is a manhattan-based writer and artist whose work explores the intersections of body, language, and transformation. his writing has appeared in panorama, beyond queer words, bull: men’s fiction, and stone of madness press, among others.