Sorrow and Longing, from the Medical Terminology Study Card series

the medical body versus the lived body

to break
glass-like
movement of the heart

and...

coughing up
star-like star shaped
breast pain







These study cards were given to me as a gift, found initially in a thrift store in Oregon.  My friend knew I would love them....

I did love them.  But they sat on a shelf for almost ten years.  On occasion, out of curiosity I would pull one, read it, and then place it right back into its container, not yet aware of its potential. Several months ago during a period of crisis and transition I again pulled a card, examined it, and, as a healing gesture, burned out the text that made no sense to me.  I repeated this over and over, forming poems from the text that remained.  Over the period of about a month I created over 50 elegies, each one a combination of three cards.  They perform as little haikus, transforming a vocabulary of pathology, objectivity, and detachment into meditations on intimacy and desire.

The name of the paint, that provides the stage for their existence here, is stolen kiss.