The Poetry Project

Notes on Accident & Attraction

Amanda Monti

Three years ago i heard Samuel Delaney say Accident and Attraction are, after all, what
make a place.

In the polish deli it smells of dill, smoked meat and sauerkraut. A tapestry of plastic wood darkens the window. Between accident and attraction are fermenting ghosts. They are filling the air with yeses and nos and the naturally occuring yeasts and the people we get to cite through our bodies, who ferment into the cities through accident(attraction).

The person behind the smoked sausages says cześć because i look polish but the only thing i know how to say is Koza Na Dachu, which i learned via my mother as she had learned it via her mother, who had come to germany via munich as a polish refugee, Goat on The Roof.

You have buzzed your hair and i let my hand glide over your exposed skull, exhilarated about a new level of proximity to your skin. all summer i have been pulling your hair, now i struggle and slip on your licked head, a clumsy cartographer of your body, i note down how your eyes get watery from want.

i have come to believe that i am a tall, gay citation of my grandmother. here, in the polish deli everyone knows this and when the person behind the salami says dschan-kooyye she is addressing my grandmother’s ghost. this happens through human eyes registering the light of dead stars. as a kid I was still able to speak with the dead and in the train i’d ask my grandmother’s ghost: which seats would remain free?

In the back of the deli, the frozen section leaks oil. pierogi are seeping out of their plastic containers, glistening in orange and purple. ginormous frozen mushrooms held up by pictures of friendly trees. when you moved in, i was wrapped in a tight silken night gown, oily and tall, i was reading fiction and marked the page that introduced your body.

i watch my hand amongst the slippery packaging now, greasily lubricated, hesitant. i am standing here open, in the deli and if anyone was to ask me I’d say yes, yes, let’s go.

THE LESBIAN BODY THE JUICE THE SPITTLE THE SALIVA THE SNOT THE SWEAT THE TEARS THE WAX THE URINE THE FAECES THE EXCREMENTS THE BLOOD THE LYMPH THE JELLY THE WATER THE CHYLE THE CHYME THE HUMOURS THE SECRETIONS THE PUS THE DISCHARGES THE SUPPURATIONS THE BILE THE JUICES

Sauerkraut can be lifted into plastic bags with a pair of wet thongs. there are booths of carrots and cumin seed. cabbage is finely shredded, layered with salt and left to ferment. The process of fermentation is about time (accident) and the yeast present in the room (attraction.)

The first time i read Samuel Delaney was underground and at the time i was in love with someone called Monique, who coincidentally introduced me to the Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig, which changed the way i read it. i keep on slipping through Wittig’s prose like a licked skull, personal pronouns are fragmented by punctuation, a queer body is mapped in violent torrent.

M/Y BODY M/Y LOVE THE ACIDS THE FLUIDS.

Air-borne bacteria culture on raw cabbage leaves, where they grow. in three years i have been your friend, fried, side lover dish, ambiguous animal, in between the aisle, salt and soaking water, top, the diary, over there by the eggshells, freshly risen, fallen, too liquidy, just right, honey, horny, finally, initially lavender milk, koza na, dachu, clover hibiscus. To be a text in total rupture with its book one must move through reading like versatile lava. i book marked you with the blaze of my wet finger tip. how you moan when your fists are thrusting inside of me, how you cannot contain your juice when my pussy is in your mouth, i clash my pubic bone against your teeth, i want the sharp edges to tear through my flesh and rattle through my bones and wake me to the moving magma beneath (inside) us, the crust gasping in heat and ridiculing our need for languaging and bones, the magma, how it flows like hot cum.

Dikes are imaginable as the veins of a volcano, the pathways of rising magma. Most dikes can be described as fractures into which magma intrudes or from which they might erupt.

The accident of bodies and language is what creates infrastructure inside (body) and outside(train). For example: i wrote down what Samuel Delaney said while sitting next to a beautiful stranger, which has changed the way i read those words. in the introduction to the Lesbian Body, Wittig says that rupture is necessary because

the 'I' who writes, is alien to her own writing at every word because this 'I' uses a language alien to her;

What is the difference between aliens and ghosts? Volcanos and oceans? In my language i encounter ghosts sharing canoes with aliens. Hold me, I’m yours, crisp and curled. In the deli i speak in a tongue alien to my ghosts, goats on roofs, written onto my body, i can hear them fermenting the air, how far, how old, how strange. i have come to believe that we are either taller or shorter, gayer citations of one another. i have come to dream of a language in which we can help each other board the train and in which we can share each other's board sandwiches beyond the limitations of time and space and in which we read/see/eat each other out. i have come to believe that i would see you in this train.

Desire creatures fragmentation like a rattling train. Eros, as we touch, is yearning. Yearning is lack. Lack is w/hole. T(h)rust till there is no more m/e. i want to be in a steel canoe gliding through your body, taking temperature, taking viscosity measurement, writing it into the margins of your poem. To write rupture into grammar like the queer body writes rupture into heterotonic plates, is to keep on rattling with ghosts.

Ziege auf dem Dach and Which seats would remain free? i ask my grandmother’s ghost and she was always right. But i could not tell you what language in. Now she speaks to me through specialized cells high up in the human nose (mushrooms in autumn) and the corners of my smile. Magma hits the ocean to be pounded and eroded by the waves in a process as old as the world. Koza na Dachu.

i am covered in oil and sauerkraut juice. The person by the pickled aisle is very kind. We eat each other out in the sculpture park, we have sex with every one who has touched this bag of rye flour. You insert your hand into my body and i can’t tell how many fingers, all i know is, yes. i say “i don’t really speak Polish, but i wish i could”. She says “You look like someone i know.” i tell her about the formation of volcanos. i tell her about my grandmother, how did i get this far from the roof, she says. aliens and ghosts all share this quality. She says, that’s funny, in Warsaw we had an earthquake the exact moment your grandmother boarded the train. i say one thing and do not take notes of her reply, but it has changed the way i will be able to read this text in the past.

Work from My Smutty Valentine: Queer Kinships and the Poetics of Smut with Anchoress Syndicate

Elsewhere