The Refining of Movement
an excerpt from Lindsay Miles’ A Period of Non-Enforcement
Welcome to [RE:CON]CRETIONS! A new series of excerpts from our forthcoming and recent publications.
Today, OS collaborator Lindsay Miles shares an excerpt from her new digital chapbook A Period of Non-Enforcement, out now from The Operating System. Want more? Check out our interview with Miles about her work.
I google grace and its definition and get several. A short
prayer before meals. The quality of being thoughtful.
Charming. A change in direction taken in music. A
period of non-enforcement. The refining of movement.
I learn women have always torn pages from their
notebooks. I hook the neck of my sweatshirt around my
right shoulder and read this line through the faint but
genuine sensation of choking: The secret to life is that
everyone must sew it for themselves.
In the Toronto neighborhood of Brockton, there is the
downcast face of Saint Helen speckled in gold and a spire
extending up into the sky. Te spire is visible from the
third floor of the YMCA at College and Dovercourt; the
spire is visible from the Dundas Street bridge where an
auto body shop stands gorgeous and without allegiance
above the tracks. Late in life, Saint Helen found three
crosses in the dirt. She brought all three crosses to the
bedside of a sick woman. She had the sick woman touch
each one consecutively, waiting for the touch that would
heal her. Saint Helen can be seen loosely gripping a large
cross in the majority of her portraits; she was without
want except for the true cross which was her want. She
made her desire singular, and this is what O’Connor
wanted in 1946 when she wrote,
The desires of the flesh — excluding the stomach
– have been taken away from me. For how long I
don’t know, but I hope forever. It is a great peace
to be rid of them. Can’t anyone teach me how to
pray?
On a therapist’s coffee table, repeated: three things I am
grateful for, each instance separated by three black lines
signaling space to write. Again, I am thinking about the
saints, this time Dymphna who is unbelievably young in
her paintings, fifteen, which is the age she was murdered
by her father for refusing to marry and hence refusing to
fuck. Patron saint of insanity, Dymphna ran away from
her Irish home and opened a hospital in Geel, Belgium
before, as Nell Zink might put it, she stopped dying. She
has a shrine in Massillon, Ohio. Due to a recent fre,
pilgrims and visitors meet across the street in a school
gymnasium. I tell my therapist, it is impossible to connect
with the spirit of my dead grandmother in this fucking city.
She nods gravely.
About the Author
LINDSAY MILES is among the winners of the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry is Dead, Bad Nudes, Plenitude, The Maynard, Self Care for Skeptics and Emerge: The Writer’s Studio Anthology. With a Creative Writing MFA from the University of Guelph, Lindsay is the author of the chapbook, Aloha Motel. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
ABOUT THE COVER ART:
The Operating System 2019 chapbooks, in both digital and print, feature art from Heidi Reszies. The work is from a series entitled “Collected Objects & the Dead Birds I Did Not Carry Home,” which are mixed media collages with encaustic on 8 x 8 wood panel, made in 2018. Heidi writes: “This series explores objects/fragments of material culture- -how objects occupy space, and my relationship to them or to their absence.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heidi Reszies is a poet/transdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, Virginia. Her visual art is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and is the creator/curator of Artifact Press. Her poetry collection titled Illusory Bordersis forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019, and now available for pre-order. Her collection titled Of Water & Other Soft Constructions was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry (forthcoming in 2019).
Find her at heidireszies.com
