v.

i wrestle with metal every evening, in order to use my body Correctly. i came here to brutalize myself until i make it into a beautiful thing.

my hands have become mangled objects in the process. the impacts of time under tension, friction. the rougher your hands become, the easier it is to hold on. in moments of nervousness or moments of thought, i trace the ridges. to think of them as mountains with fault lines. i am a geologist of papillary dermis and stratum corneum.

we develop most of our palm lines in the womb, you know.

something about feeling, concretely, all that weight pressing down on you and not letting it crush you. something about ai-generated videos of woodland animals under a hydraulic press.

to fall ceaselessly and to catch ceaselessly.

there used to be a woman at the gym who would always ask me if i was a ballet dancer, as if she had forgotten my answer the last several times. a smaller me was told that i was not made for ballet. something about my bones. something about my knees, especially.

my grandmother was a competitive ballerina because she had the right knees. in old russian conservatories, some stern mouths line up baby girls and arrange their knees like rows of teeth. they poke and examine and pick out the ones with the best bones.

on a bookshelf in my parents’ apartment sits a fist-sized woman in marble, forever in a third arabesque. sometimes i imagine my grandmother ossified in that posture and supine in her bed.