Convalescing in a Slaughterhouse

– this should be our today’s fluorescent tattoo

written on our forehead

as we abscond from our egotistic pain

of existing

not for The Other

but in Spite of another.

Dangling with animosity,

there’s an empty embrace between zombie brothers

there’s a dirty space dripped in red hallow

there’s snow crying in the blazing light

there’s a front row for the wicked

there’s a back row for the weakest

there’s ecce animot in the middle

and yet

there’s always the same cutting in line,

there’s you or me, no (and).

Look at you,

walking in the hallway with further bloodletting in the mind

just like your love-thy-but-not-quite neighbor,

grazing his shoulder with

what undoubtedly should be a soul

but you depict as a tiktok caring.

Look at me,

waking up in no sound and slowly gazing into the abyss

as inert as a poker face doll on a shelf,

already worn down by

what carelessly is a passage of time

but I know it as a form of not-being.

Look at us,

hanging inexplicably from the same crude and rotting ceiling

akin to a puzzle of pieces of meat put together,

nobody to fit us in

what timelessly could be a world

but we draw it as what needs conquering.

Dangling with soreness indeed,

no more family to lean on, it’s shattered

no more faith to believe in, it’s frozen

no more bliss to dwell on, it’s dark outside

no more trust to count on, it’s war inside

no more frailty to ambulance, just pity

no more Other

thus

just road rage, driving fast

towards you or me, no (us).

And when it hits

the rest is silence?

You don’t say!

Oh, wait…

……………..

bio

Mihaela Coman is profoundly concerned about silence, with a focus on how female bodies, societal perceptions, and behaviours are affected by it, advocating for a new approach to recovering gaze and visual attentivity. With a BA in Romanian and Spanish Language and Literature, she is focusing on her MA thesis in Visual Cultural Studies (CESI) at the University of Bucharest. Her research stems from traumatic silence, and it extends into tranzactive silence and incorpor(e)alization, two concepts she proposes for artistic visual forces, sensations and body figurability. She is also exploring spectrality, transgenerational trauma transfer and prosthetic memory through an analytic body of works from literature, photography, painting, film and theatre.