from Rose Mortal Activity

from “Superliquid water”

o nce I told myself I’m going to take a picture of superliquid water. But having programmed an extremely long exposure time to account for the opulence and turpitude of its flowing/nautical mess/hustle of water, we didn’t recognize as liquid that thing which flowed, scandalously gushing down the fountain’s basins in baroque offsets, we thought it was a sculpted piece of its architecture, like siamese dolphins plunging in to exalt its shape or the most eroded chunks of stone. From extremely ductile, it could thus become as hard as marble, and my thigh under the stream a vein of its amphibious fuss. That said, you would have gotten roughly the same result with normal water from a proportionately longer exposure, and these pictures couldn’t stand as proof. It was/at this point we decided to give up wanting to prove anything, and kept writing about it with the flow



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o ne of the definitions of prose might be the following: writing by placing as few words as possible on the surface of the text, which means everywhere they’re in contact with the rest of the page—which you call “blanks”—as if words would rather move into a mass and stay in it, as if they needed to be in contact with their neighbors and had very low tolerance for being in contact with wordless space. Starting with a bare line, prose (though it wishes it had never started) would form this system designed to minimize the number of words at the boundary between what is written and what isn’t, enduring a force equivalent to what is called surface tension in the case of water, and thankfully words on the left and right sides don’t count, because they’re not truly exposed, or only at the edge/the ignorant ledge of a letter, for if they were, we might see texts round themselves into ball shapes, to make their surface of contact as small as possible, and we’d have to read or make round books



*

s o you want to know the true structure of water, o mysterious, which you heard was a mixture of liquid and ice and, a few years later, of two liquids (!) with different densities, and I must say that with this second hypothesis we were close to the answer/“getting warmer” if I may, although with temperature changes—in terms of water—you should always be careful, and I recommend instead continuing to write at room temperature if I want to have a chance to make you understand, while we’re at it, that the structure of superliquid water is a mix of liquids and words; their contact with one another exposes them to surface tension, and they make sentences get rounder without ever reaching the tip of their meaning (hence the rounding), and even when a sentence looks like it might, the next one is there to get back on track/to soften its meaning like rough edges, and here’s the object, suddenly, like a drop, round almost



from “I’m a great actryst”

I’m a great actryst
I’m a great actryst
I’m a great actryst
I’m a great actryst
I’m a great actryst

not actress
not artist
ac - tryst
like in english
like in the past participle
when you’re in the passive voice:
to be “actressed”
to be burned to be dead to be kissed
incurring the act of
not being the subject of the act
being the actress of the act’s non-subject
I am the actress of the act’s non-subject
for you I’ll pronounce any word
(that’s pronounceable)
to make sure it’s pronounceable (to be
honest that’s the only reason to do it/no one ever thinks
to verify that words are pronounceable, what if one day they weren’t)
and I make myself disappear with it
that’s how I spend my time/merely
disappearing while I pronounce the words
“disappear”
“appear”
“put on the neon-tactile jumpsuit”
in the moment of being kissed
(for kissing implies the necessity of a moment
not the opposite, no moment requires kissing)
in the dark torrential torrent/in the dark current
to be kissed to be dead to be burned
I play roles of decomposition
and speak to you ultimately from behind the coral reef
it gives me a hyper-changing voice
hyper-unstable hyper-useless
and glowing in your ears
as if you were listening to it with your eyes
plunged in a liquid whose sparkle is captured in super-zoom
—ethereal-torrential stickers, hovering—
and a body with siren legs
of course you don’t believe it
when you kiss in the moment of decision
neither of you actually
decides anything about the voice you’re about to give up: it’s still a voice, look
they just dug up its statuette

I’m a great actress
as soon as I drop the idea,
the radiators’ image falls!

at the same time I wonder what a pronounceable word is
because I think I’ve pronounced many in my head before saying them
conceived them in a sort of accent-less tongue
but when I’m about to say one (that I’ve long repeated to myself) another one
comes out in its place
by the way “in its place”, in what place am I saying it/that is
what is it re-placing?

in my opinion, it’s the same one aggravated
or effaced depending on cases and circumstances
so in the end a word is never
ever/really/voluntarily pronounceable
or/but in the place of another
now they exchange their
pronounceability/their degree of irresistible motion
I am the unresisted that’s how I once disclosed my identity in an sms which
(probably for that exact reason) remained a dead letter, or in other words, heated in very low resistance like certain alloys

or when I do pronounce the word I’d planned/to pronounce
the one I’d repeated time and time again
it’s I who disappears, or if you
will,
it’s I who disappears in its place, or if it makes more sense
I disappear

—that’s a greater physical effort than hurdling, a lesser one than vaulting—

see now I almost talk I almost don’t pronounce anymore