Mississippi Mouth
an introduction to dykes day
The following is the re-published introduction written by me for dykes day, a holigay, now available to order. Curated by Mayah Lovell and Fabiola Ching, dykes day is an anthology of prose and poetry exploring a fictional surrealist holiday for lesbians based on Lovell’s original manuscript and published by Hermetic State.
the zone of saturation is where the pores and fractures of the ground are saturated with water
The table has been made but not set Water is poured and we remember Words melt fluid builds and pools into Energy for Change Seeping into ground fractures A clearing appears Running toward it we Gush and build and gush and build and gush and Rock is worn smooth Mountains get dimples Horizons get nipples From every beginning Energy for Change creates slits deep enough for rivers finding home Sites of memory recalling when straightened Flooding in refusal Your mississippi mouth Your every beginning Wet worlding creating a landscape over and My god oh my god We get to live here
it can also be simply explained
as the depth below which the ground is saturated
I know the day just started But here I am with pruney outstretched hands trying to pull it into tomorrow A yellow eyed woman greeted me with the reminder Water elasticizes everything But how might we keep the portal open I begged By keeping it wet they whispered Creating the terrain and the weather Our longing presented an atmosphere And our combined breath made a sound The water rises from our rivers to form a cracking cloud chorus in a sky becoming a stage Turning the color Caitlin Cherry My god oh my god We get to live here
the surface where the water pressure head
is equal to the atmospheric pressure
The day became a century And centuries became infinity Because of the gushing Keeping the world wet with words They found the portal at your table The watering(hole) a metallic two-way mirror to onlookers Protecting an internet of intimacy I paused at the window to marvel at The world wide web Made of spit and time My god, oh my god We get to live here
at increasing depths, water fills in more of the pore spaces
in the soils, until a zone of saturation is reached
A holiday for the wet we Transported by fractured ground Unafraid of pleasure Running toward its mouth Screaming with ecstasy and flooding with remembrance Suspended and submerged Oh my god We get to live here
Water Table, Wikipedia. “The water table is the surface where the water pressure head is equal to the atmospheric pressure (where gauge pressure = 0). It may be visualized as the "surface" of the subsurface materials that are saturated with groundwater in a given vicinity.”
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power by Audre Lorde. Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. “ In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.”
The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83-102. “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
Sunhead Emergent Leviathan, Caitlin Cherry, 2019