Hoch’s View from a Bilge Pump on a High-Rise “DADA speaks with you, it is everything, it envelops everything, it belongs to every religion, can be neither victory or defeat, it lives in space and not in time.” ~ Francis Picabia Hoch snips her photomontage with a sharp tongue. Da means yes in Slavonic. Or does dada mean hobbyhorse in French? She is Germanic, no face, no nonsense woman wired to her white hair. She means no, but can’t make up her mind, decide where the line divides itself between life and art, hetero and homosexuality. This is where she lives, in her own collage of the in-between, trying to make a stand for something, just not knowing what, stuck hanging on the edge of her own blank map until suddenly, her husband pulls her up from the lip of a building, screws her onto the port side into a bilge pump where she overlooks her own city, mismatching faces and bodies, gender – men’s heads on babies’ bodies, machines and humans – gears polluting eyes. Greta Garbo straddles Kathe Kollwitz in an alley below, both in striped pant suits twirling cigars between five fingers like a baton, all the while discussing how to best take advantage of men with red feather boas and finally it all makes sense to her, this illogical façade of senselessness, women using the ideals of beauty to outsmart men, smog annihilating industry and all the generals involved in the creation, the need for dada to consume her, the urgency in which she desires to spread the word to artistic and materialistic consumers that it is okay to be in the middle, in space, unsure of liking men or women, industry or nature. She unscrews herself, finally decides to reject her “good girl” image, and creates illogical cut-outs from other art forms, even though hers will never quite measure up, but isn’t that the point? She is done with perfection, never quite had it anyway. Dada is her new religion. Til Brugman, her ex-female lover, preached – never perform in a female masquerade: and more poetically, never darken your eyes with the devil just to parade around in non-clicking heels. She resolves to claim back not only her masculinity, but also cooking, confidence, and anxiety, and her desire to create the ridiculous. She slices all things she likes and dislikes from the city below and imposes them, one at a time, in her own space filled with everything, all her idiosyncrasies that prove the world is a blank rooftop packed with pointless possibility. Lesley Richardson Lesley Richardson holds an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a certificate in Multicultural and Transnational Literature from East Carolina University. Her M.F.A. thesis was awarded a Pass with Distinction, a first-time award. She taught at Coastal Carolina Community College for eight years, and she is in her twelfth year of teaching at Cape Fear Community College. Her publications are included in the following literary magazines and journals: Coal City Review, Flint Hills Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, California Quarterly, and Main Street Rag among others. She is currently working on a novel and a book of poetry.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies. Continuing here means you consent. Thank you. Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
February 2025
|