"This is a photograph. . ." [by Katie Peyton]

1. (a self-portrait in Mexico by Savannah Spirit).

This is a photograph.

 

My friend photographs her body at 40, in Ajijic, in December. She says that is when the conditions are right for photography, when needles of light will attach like music. She takes a hundred shots, sends a few out into the world, and waits for the next December.

 

She knows cameras lie. Words smudge. She doesn’t know but suspects that one day her skin will be a ritual space on which weather will gather. I don't really know her: friend made event, a broken line, a porcupine of light.

 

She gave me this photograph, and I show it to people who come to my apartment. Do you like it? I ask. They say, it’s amazing. Then, oh my gosh. I see the woman!

2. (a painting by Alannah Farrell)

This is a painting. 

There’s a blue hand, dead center, and below it, a pair of human legs. They’re in a room, which seems to have a remnant of an older room inside of it. The light from the east is dead and golden, an ancient warning to sailors who lived in worlds without rooms.

The arm is lost in the afternoon; the hand is the color of daybreak. The front leg looks real: an unreliable narrator. The back leg reaches out: a bad victim.

I’m trying to remember the story, but these legs don’t keep diaries. They are too personal. Life is precarious here. 

I do remember when the hand leaves—when it puts itself on the knob and turns itself—it walks off with the door. 

I see a hand, but the legs see only the infinite space between yellow and blue. 

There is no other world, however hard you want there to be.

Why is there no furniture? He says other girls are easy. The legs don’t know how to answer and don’t answer. Who answers that.

I remember reading the only thing that travels faster than light is shadow. It makes sense, if you think about it: shadow is just an absence, really nothing at all. 

In paint, the shadow is real. In paint, even light ages.

Absences don’t obey speed limits. Even if they are posted clearly. But legs vote.

Centuries later, he still haunts the light. 

-- Katie Peyton

Image 1: Savannah Spirit, Eye of the Sun, 2017, Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches.
Image 2: Alannah Farrell, Sleep Paralysis, 2018, Oil on linen, 11 x 14 inches