Just You and Me, Write?

Dear Write,

I made things before I knew I was making things. I made things before I made sure I had a me. I don’t know why. I don’t like myself much and would rather have a thing that is me that is outside of me and I like myself so much I would like another thing of me that is another flesh to be inside. Write, you are a new body for my me. I like to be contained in things because I am a small vessel. Someone said “I contain multitudes” but I am spilling out of myself and always have been.

You are like sex except you, my write, don’t think anything of me. You, write, are like sex because there is a way that I am acting myself in this you that is not me. It’s about the leaving, my own exit from my body. I can be myself in your me.

Now I exist.

You are a new cup. You are nice because you hold me like that, like a thing that needs a hammock to keep it very delicate with my back on flight above the ground. You keep me from gravity. The earth pulls me down because I am a little earth and there can’t be two of us. You keep me up.

Like pulls like to it. If you cut a human heart to halves they make their own separate beats. If you put them next to each other again they take a second and then synchronize. This isn’t a matter of defeat. They agree.

Make a rhythm with me. This happens just as well at the cellular level. The plasma hums together too. Two puddles of water on a sloped surface become one puddle of water and that is like me and you.

We are like two bodies of water or two winds in cross-breeze or two fires taking the air from the same room. That’s us. We’re like whole earths. Planets in love. You’ve got gravity.

We have molten cores very magnetic and in them there is this want for more of the hot rock. We are earths that melt. Lava body lover we go down the sloping hills to find each other. We go up in steam. Smoke you rise the fluid and choke. How is it we can be the waterflame and rock that breathes? Can’t you see we are every element and motion everywhere?

You move toward me.

I have a body and it pulls more bodies toward me. Like you are my living moon. Or I yours.

If no one sees us we won’t know which of us orbits the other. One must have an audience for an eclipse. It’s about perspective. Witness. Look how things are lining up.

You need an audience because someone has to acknowledge where the one body stops and the other begins. I need an audience to tell me when I cease to be myself and become something else.

When do I become you? I would like to know when my skin ends and turns to art. I would like to know where we move apart.

Sometimes I make innocuous things. Like lampshades or holiday ornaments. These things are not fine art. These things are called functional art and people like it because they like to think about it less and put it on their desks or houseplants and understand it and enjoy it and look at it and use it. These things are called crafts and they are not art.

They are not art because art is fine art.

Fine art is things you make that take up space but can’t be used for anything but the looking and the understanding and the enjoying of it, which is fine, because it is nice to look at and understand and enjoy something. It is fine.

Fine art doesn’t hold your lipstick or cast light or tell time or decorate a fir tree.

Mostly I don’t make crafts. I don’t make vases and clocks and handbags. Mostly I don’t make fine art. I don’t paint pictures or turn iron to human form. Mostly I make you, write.

Write, you are like functional art because you have the little pieces and the glue and all I have to do is put you together. Write, you are like craft. You are like crafting.

Write you are like fine art because all I can really do with you is feel something.

I’m not sure what you do to be useful, write. You do not cast light on the walls or tell me the time. I wish you would. But you won’t just sit there and take up space for me to think on. Because of you, my wrist-watch has become as much fine art as my paintings are for eating on. Canvas is a dinner plate. A clock is just a consideration.

I make you before I know I am making something. Bodies move through space without thinking much about it. We have somewhere to go. Someone is watching us bring our hands together like a pair meant for holding. An audience. I have something to write, something to be, and I just let the pull bring me.

If I had more than one body to use I would be more alive. You live in me too, write. You are the useless fine art of my heart. Heat, the exhibit from the inside. If I had a soul you would be its proof. Logic problem the ghost of me that inhabits you. My hand is a medium to conjure your voice. I let you speak through me so my mouth has something greater to do. You are the craft of my flesh, I am a utilitarian vessel, a cracked old vase, but still holding you. It gives me something to do. There are openings where the Earth shows how angry it is inside, like the whole spirit of the universe has to be pushed pressure through the one little tube. Volcano, vagina, oil paint. I think we like to think of these things as violent. Exploding out. But sometimes it is the pull over the push that hurts us most, the places we move toward without seeing the force. The moon grabs for the tide with her invisible strings. There isn’t much negotiating. I will follow you because I have to, let you sway my body from up there and from below.

Love to you. Write,

Dana Jaye

dana jaye, a cofounder of Circus Book, is a writer and artist living in brooklyn and currently pursuing her mfa in poetry at rutgers university-newark, where she also teaches. she’s most recently had work published in north american review and hyland magazine, and she runs an online multimodal journal at selfiesinink.com, check out her twitter @danajaye for her episodic microverse series #myfeelings, #furtherfables, and #andthecatsays.