RACHEL ZAVECZ
LOVE ON TELEVISION
| Something like love when the surgeon (hand silver-gloved and glistening with complex layers of blood-spun cells) cuts the flame-red cinnamon-stones into place along costal facets of her thoracic vertebrae Love notched hexagonal and shining against a crowning ridge of white bone peeled from carefully striated flesh Blushing love not only in the mewling holograms lapping thirsty at the runoff, pointed snouts nuzzled deep into clean-cut edges of spread-open flesh their small lazuline teeth like transparent needles flickering in vicious games of dominance and submission, but also in the seamless pink face concentric haloed in clinical light the nameless surgeon pressing rosy cross sections of soft tissue and muscle between clear slides of a dazzling glass |
| This is the new image of love magnified and projected out into space across millions of glowing pixels the kind of intimacy reserved for the complete destruction and resurrection of the IconTM, the body's furniture unsewn and RECONFIGURED!TM / REIMAGINED! TM / REDEFINED! TM / RECONSTRUCTED! TM / REORIENTED! TM / RECONCEPTUALIZED! TM / REFORMULATED! TM / REUPHOLSTERED! TM / re: REFURBISHED! TM |
| How then (medically speaking) is the body shaped for love, the surgeon's gilded hand slithered quietly between dark organs moving slowly liquid into a cosmic system of rearrangement and equilibrium vibrating with the galvanic intensity of some further indefinite but desperate desire? When the surgeon commits an act of physical violence / atrocity against the contemporary structure of her anatomical figure, it's like fucking drawn down an infinite pornographic corridor of refracting light, every viewer fastened at the eye to each snap of rib or pearl-inlaid sternum – orgasming catastrophically as the surgeon threads a dozen fire opals along a glossy chain of cherried heartstring |
| Geometric: and orgasming catastrophically as the surgeon threads a dozen rubies along a glossy chain of cherried heartstring And catastrophically orgasming as the surgeon threads a dozen rubies along a glimmering chain of cherried heartstring And catastrophically orgasming as the surgeon threads a dozen fire opals along a glossy thread of cherried marrow, And orgasming catastrophically as the surgeon chains a dozen fire opals along a shining thread of russet marrow, Etc. |
| And her segmented body: welcomes the intimacy of the surgeon's whetted glove in repetition Love, a meticulous technology : a bloodshed : a hysterical Orgasm trailing out into night and dissembling |
SUPERNOVA
| Sunlit bathtub all marble and skylight lit against the pale skin of his face he bisected slips into the lilac-petald liquid shimmer of the bull-ringed spring the superstar, quick slick and platinum hard as the blood double blooms from wrists into the baptismal pool of inking azure The sparkling magazine writer wears a double-breasted blazer of overlapping scales and the tonality is ringing against the marbles throats and its loud and bronze and hip and its filling the immensity of space and its making him bleed out faster than the interview itinerary will allow Pressed pen to feathered paper the writer begins a series of inquiries regarding overlapping the drama of suicidal tendencies and its current its hip its breaking its what's going on in the room right now The writer is feeling an overwhelming sense of scale and overlapping, is small The writer is lapping at the font of bull-ringed liquidity |
| Newsflash: these bulls are rearing these bulls are "it" these bulls are hot these bulls are possessing the writer as a dreamy sense of overwhelming sexual desire these bulls have hooves like struck bells in the shards of blood-filtered sunlight This is another snuff film for the histories of the dark web |
| How many times is it that you've died? I like to think of it less like dying and more like being reborn |
| A star unfurls like a bruise into the churning heart of a universe and the molecules and plasma and writers it holds disperse into the celestial waters of time and space Somewhere a mask is bleeding red into the azure water of an ostentatious marble bathtub ringed with testicle-laden bulls but how is anything ever worth tracing the way the money tends to change hands? Why does this existence remain stuck on repeat? Like a film, a mind or any other form of invisible thread A superstar flickering out against a transparent sheet, again and again and again Blood tearing slowly into the water like thick chains of electricity through mercury, and he drops the cherries onto a silver cushion |
| So how many times have you been "reborn"? (laughs) I'd say it's in the triple digits now. I don't really like to keep count because I feel like it might influence my reputation for spontaneity. |
| A lens zooms in to catch the drama in the details |
| [video feed] The knife lies at the edge of the waters rippling and is overly bedazzled with matter & rubies &high definition slit like a black eye opening |
Rachel Zavecz is a book artist and writer currently living in Salt Lake City. She co-edits the small press Carrion Bloom Books with fellow writer Jace Brittain. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and is a PhD candidate in Fiction at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Sporklet, and Fairy Tale Review, among others.