L O U D    C R E V I C E

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                                    by writer Sue Rainsford, a response to the performance film, Orphaned From Belonging.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         This sound—it belongs to the split bark of an aged tree where fresh sap comes thick and

trickling.

 

Or else, it belongs to a slow tongue testing the edges of the mouth it lives in while teeth click wetly within their pinkish gums. This sound is the sound of a mouth where enamel roots have come loose and turned fibrous: a wefted, gauzy canopy that catches the voice of a throat already stoppered with pellets of breath that misfire and catapult.

 

No; it’s something else. This sound, this sound.

 

It’s a refrain that simmers up from the gut.

No, not the gut. From an organ with a deeper core.  

An organ where red apples are often crunching, where rules are written in red ink and thereafter

redly broken. 

 

This sound. It is what you hear when a pelvis tilts and speaks its verse: a pulsing sequence of chords that rushes rivulet-veins and sees them flash pale blue, flash violet. It is a sequence that loops and loops, that taps and glitches until, until, until—here, now: a discharge of rubber, an expulsion of linen.

 

Once dispossessed of fistula and fissure this is what happens in the taut, ebony-dark between a pair of hips and a single heart: wild birth comes toppling forth. The nuts and bolts of old hurts push, push and this is the sound they make, this sound of membrane held in wet suspension

between twin knots of bone: torn.

 

This sound. 

Of a puncture, a siphoning.

Of a suture making kiss two tender strips of rosy flesh. 

 

It is a sound that can only be heard from within a cave, a cavern, a chamber, a cleft, a crease, a

crevice.

 

The sound of a veil coming off, a second skin sloughing. Its fibres so quick to soften to a pool of cream and cream-coloured pulp, only ankle-deep but deep enough to glisten as it flows towards lips that are fused, lips that are parting.   

 

Lips that come apart and sip on the nectar of a flower that hot blood has set blooming.

 

This sound, this sound.

Of a pomegranate’s thousand seeds finally spilling.

 

This sound of a knowing wound whose pattern is the pattern of the ocean, whose reach is the

reach of an endless ribbon.

From where does it unspool?

 

A cave, a cavern, a chamber.

A cleft, a crease.

A crevice.

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