Experimental Prose, Elida Silvey
Making a decision on self is unprompted. There are some things that you know with your mind and some things you know with your over mind. It starts as a tingle, creeping into the body from the connective tissues down at the atomic level moving outward, to the endlessness that lives as particles long after you leave this place. A state of being. As if for once my body was able to sense the air around it vibrating in the early morning sunshine, a truth resurfaces amongst the fiction. Find your horse hair brushes to excavate. It rained the night before, a man in a house facing the park watches intently the droplets coming on across a field. A woman’s hand, or the idea of her hand closes in, like binocular-eyed spy men In brass suits, in their rooms on skyscrapers which is really only a figment to represent kingdoms with walls held close to the centre back when lance-ing someone was a common epitaph. There in their obsidian spaces with contact sheets full of one option of the truth, or another — they’ll lear and loom. Circle the potential for destruction with a felt tip pen. When did they begin to call them markers?
The girl watches her tv which is to say a computer because her family screen sits in front of a couch, far too exposed and exposing. She’d play the Oregon trail giving pixelated ‘pardner’ to people that were nothing more, nothing less than a reconstruction of a reconstruction. Passed down to bargain shelves in Todo a Dollar that really sold items for 7 dollares, more or less — the dollar having lost its particular sheen by then. A woman washes the green of grass stains out of her trousers. A man calls his manhood to attention, on camera, on the big screen, in Times Square. A pale blue glistens. You zoom in with your phone camera to the top left window of a building with embossed letters. An arch creates intuition, creates the opportunity for possibility. A question bubbles like the water in a kettle, steam bouncing off the surface of the lid to create an aching pop. You crack your back by twisting against the seat, one way and then the next. Life is turned into railroad tracks that choo and chug between the Alamo of selfhood and the white picket fence of expectation. You aren’t quite sure which one of the two best suits.
The fisherman shove their fists into ice buckets, in search of something, a dash of mist sprinkles. Salt, or the crushed bleach equivalent you buy on offer in Lidl. The ideas dawn on you, slowly at first like a tickle in the spine after watching round after round of asmr videos in your bedroom to de-stress. Try to sleep it off, the comments suggest. Then quick like a lightning bolt striking the top of your frazzled head, hair up on its ends and aha! there it is — an idea becomes something tangible. A tornado in Moore, Oklahoma tears through the available plots. There in that moment thin air becomes oh so painfully real. By now the subjectivity of the sentence alarms you. You are swooning to the context of beginning, middle and end. You are swooning at verb and adjective and sometimes, with a little bit of help, at the all present Noun. All packaged there in an instant in the hallways of your brain, they react and collide. Two particles smashed against one another at great speed creates an atomic bomb. Everything inside you explodes and is invariably different than before. You imagine tracing their route backward, a form of ancestry, but get lost in all the imagery.
Everything in your mind is remembered in disjointed sound and moving photos—stop motion clicking into vibrating sequences. You acclimate to their torrential downpour and attempt to form a tether in text. Isn’t that just…? Isn’t that just a poem? The rules alight from their judge box, powdered wigs intact, thick mahogany gavel in hand, rosy cheeks a mere circle of tradition and expectation — ensnaring the sentence. Admonishing it for wriggling so far away from their grasp. You pull it back, like a scarf to your neck. Ashley Tisdale used to wear sparkly ones and you’d beg your mom to get you one but you’d end up making it up in your mind when all there was, was Walmart fleece. This scarf is all yours, unbranded. Wear it proudly on the tip of your tongue. The desert’s playful negative space welcomes you in. You burn the picket fence as kindling.
Elida Silvey is a self-taught Mexican-American poet, writer, and editor living in London, UK. Her work is an exploration of the effects desire, language and memory have on identity. She has self-published several zines—Home in Limbo and Southwest—and a full poetry collection titled Nothings. She is a writer for Hard of Hearing Magazine, a member of the Gobjaw Poetry Collective, and the second iteration of Un Nuevo Sol. She is also the Assistant Editor at Montez Press.
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