AT BRAURON

Rosa Appignanesi

I am the daughter of my father / drag others into that pool of whurrr.

The absent-minded itch –

take the Blood!

I don’t know why you need the itch.

I left at Brauron,

a strongly worded letter

an aspirin

the aforementioned itch…

Little feelings

petty objects

or objections. It is the future’s job

to turn them over, roll them round like Bora on the North

or the thud of a pebble smothered.

We endure, are complicit in our endurance.

Perhaps there even is a God, haha, though I am

far away from London

or Jerusalem.

It’s piles of excessive sentiment I drop at Brauron –

padlocks, things that go in novels…

My father breaks things and women mend them.

My father writes things and no one reads them.

Nuzzle me, in my complicity…

And, at the site of this fork (fork as in a tongue)

I give up the wrestle for

the sex of my thinking.

The problem with X is that we want to give up…

Stop now. Get in the sea.

I am little again here, please, carry me.

Brauron is an ancient site, not far from Athens, where the goddess Artemis was worshipped. Artemis occupied a liminal position in relation to womanhood, strangely both the goddess of chastity and childbirth. Brauron was likewise a liminal place. Every four years, girls would sacrifice the tokens of their girlhood (clothes, toys etc) and leave the site as women ready to marry. I have never been.

Rosa Appignanesi. Who chose to let the work speak for itself.