Corpus Delicti: A Poetic Provocation of the Posthuman

—Viktorija Kalonaityte, Senior Lecturer, Linnaeus University, Sweden.

I am no one’s future
Certainly not yours
Abort that thought.
Bandaged with
A perfect pallid scar of a smile
I’d rather stay on the other side
Of the cracked looking glass,
Hazy and counterfeit,
A death-bound flashback.

I evolve
I blossom into fractals of nonsense
My lips are carmine-red
They set the anonymity
Screaming and aflame
I am the centerfold of midnight
You can think of me as
The fog that licks stars’ wounds.
They gaze, round, vacant, misspelled
And never touch.

I am a heart:
I tighten, swell, push and push,
Keep the sticky fluids
Circulating.
The world is all flesh and teeth.
The eyes,
They circle me,
Amphibian and slippery.
Their moist irises
Slide down my skin
The quicksilver melts into a vapor
I breathe.

The body is a large emptiness
I take the silence
The silence — all
Hooks and wires
And scrape
Scrub away the wrinkles,
The fissures,
The tissue off its yellowing carcass
It shall stand, an ivory altar
In the mausoleum of sighs.

I’m undone at the seams
Faith keeps my act together,
Faith to all things many
My plastic idols, my demons,
Confetti, simulations …
I would have shot myself
With all those happy hopeful progress tales.
Loaded with blank cartridges,
They target nothing.
It’s the recoil that sent me here.

About the author
Viktorija Kalonaityte is a Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies and a member of Work Aesthetics Research Group at Linnaeus University. Her current scholarly work is at the intersection of organization theory and the humanities, inspired by the Postcolonial Theory, Girlhood studies and Gurlesque, political philosophy of Jacques Rancière and the Anthropocene. Her other interests are non-academic writing and art as a form of knowledge production.