Cynthia Sailers - Teaching Laura Mulvey

in contact with the proper ladies
to seduce them with our thoughts
so that they may waver in their
underlying narrative-----their condition
to perform with reality
to believe in science: the innocence of design
running between the picture and the calmy sleep
pretending to be older than oppression
if the self is before our very eyes
an authenticity where else multiplied,
where else swimming to be plural
whether or not we find comfort in models
wanting to eat, not eating, then eating a lot
or find the false accusation of race
or absence of race
so that you may “call me a buttress of reason,”
a subject reading then pulling back
to wards the want of my own 19th c hysteria
call me a cynic, but something is there
in the yellow wallpaper and she would want
to write a narrative to say
her dystopia was fixed, gripping the wind,
the small towns torn out of books
or an accidental hideout away from view
to find the others so same and different
but not to modernize the other-----sky


something a constructivist can’t spoil
something empowered by the exercise
of Emily Dickinson
something none of us could bother
to implement a fascism a revolution
an official prize claim
to be an indigenous woman
to be identical to the others
to have all your bees in your bonnet
also called phantasma
or the better half
we were not yet formed, we were an
awful eyesore in some abstract place
& “we continue to make things worse”


with pulpy novels of lesbians
trying to get at material we can’t live
without--------------------visual images
of savoir faire fall back
into the pristine, back to readme
borne collateral for Hollywood cinema
like being deified like being incredibly gorgeous
so that he is currently stupefied
so that he is psychologically romanced
so that you have to define desire as a pronouncement
like virgin mule hair
to give my dignity some space to wander
the hallways, value the faculty that encompass us
up into an obsolete


[from Shampoo Poetry]