Louise

I. 

It’s quiet in the box. Murmurs multiply and the faint echoes of singing and the voice of Louise Bourgeois permeate my ears. Suspended in the middle of the room, a man bends over in agony—or freedom—and reaches for his toes by arching his back. He has been decapitated and his skin glitters gold in the natural light of the 52nd floor. Here, leagues above the shuffle of the world, where each building becomes an unseemly wart sticking out of the earth, where Mt Fuji towers behind them all ominously, promising earthquakes and tsunamis, this man exposes himself. In a country where a naked body can be criminalized on film, he is surrounded by fascinated comer-bys who snap pictures. Behind him an erection, carved from metal and mounds, so many mounds, but always five. 

II.

Painted in watered down blood, the watercolor of choice for the true artist—one whose taste for pain can only be sated by creation—a voluminous belly, thighs bared to the world, an infant clawing their way free in a burst of blood and fluid; here she wrote: abandonment. A room of forsaken, fire-touched barn doors, peering through a circular cut-out, sitting on a solitary chair; this she called: isolation. Flowers like sperm bathed in blood, like the leaking of a body untethered, like a pouring, an evacuation of the insides; here was love. 

III.

Five breasts in blood, five mounds in the hillside, five nipples for latching as a child is forced to choose. Three children, two parents, one family, her family. She painted them into windows, etched them into fabric statues, laboring over their preciousness. In a landscape blushing blue and lined with mountains, five are bleeding—or alive—but also trapped behind shattered window panes. The separation aches.

IV.

Once she wrote that a man was angry at his wife. He made a delicious stew and invited his friends. They became cannibals and the wife was never seen again. Or that sugar is rare and cherished in the damp spring earth, melting in the mouth of the Earth. Or that women are flesh like any other living creature. For ten years her hands crafted words like poison, like daggers, like an antidote, like healing. But they ate her and became her.

V.

I’ve wandered this woman’s life, reduced to epithets and statues, enlarged to words without letters and full rooms of work. She took out her pain in the furious slash of the pen and the piercing slice of the saw and it was never enough. Her love shone and shrank in the recreations of the penis, the labor of the pregnant body, the mutilation of metal into a spider. We are all lording over our own creations but they will be the ones who govern our bones and rotten, putrid flesh, outlasting the fragile body and its lost memories.

Paige Eaton (she/her) is a poet who is currently teaching English in South Korea and is originally from Rochester, New York. Her work has appeared in Long Winded Anthology, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch, among others. She enjoys wandering art museums, exploring parks, and waving at cats.

A Song for Paige