RELICS FOR EXTINCT SPECIES AND PAST LOVERS 

Egyptian vultures rest heavy on my skin. My body feels like an artefact.  So I give myself a hydrating facial and think about shadow work— about how to hunt without tasting death. I wonder how to be a scavenger when living in a rib cage of dust. I wonder if I am a pillager when the airport security guards examine my deities. As they unwrap each red silk swaddle, I imagine the methodical destruction of every carved figure. But I comfort myself with images of 400 million-year-old trilobites, flecks of mica on painted stone, a patchwork of muscles and hooves.  Then I wash the pink serum off my face and begin building an altar in my temporary home, grateful to have a few large weights to turn over again and again until they feel polished.  Until I feel polished. 

Danielle Rosen

www.danielle-rosen.com 

Books

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway

Zoo, or, Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky

Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign by Che Gossett

The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics by Jane Bennett 

The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille

Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture by Bernadette Marie Calafell

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir