​Hoch’s View from a Bilge Pump on a High-Rise, by Lesley Richardson

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany by Hannah Hoch (Germany) 1919

​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.