Friday, 12 February 2021

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra – Dalí, 1936" by Geraldine Clarkson

Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms  the Skins of an Orchestra – Dalí, 1936  

 

Having always used her music as an instrument, a gift to stifle hurt in others, a searching for a niche into which she could stuff pansies or wallflowers, a grey to be drenched with peony or tangerine, she became pliable, perfectly responsive to circumstance, a kitten following its master, chase-and-nibble. At first she didn’t notice herself changing, so intent was she on pacifying with titbits the yawning jaw. Filling the jug of subjugation. Until she awoke in a boulder-desert, stone-faced, immaterial. Her life shrunk now to two needers who dominated: her mother and her daughter. Her music no more than a cipher, a distorted keyboard painted on a banner wrung out, flung out between her and the others, a mute offering. The godlike gift something less than animal or vegetable. A split skewed thing. And she, a rock-musician, no longer able to please anyone.

 

Geraldine Clarkson
Monica's Overcoat of Flesh (Nine Arches Press, 2020)

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