29.09.2021

France

Rhea Dillon for Ottolinger SS2022: HOW TO DETHORN A STONE

1 How to dethorn a stone

2 Take a seedling and place into the ocean’s palm

3 Bring the salt to the surface by reminding them that to float a while doesn’t mean to give up

4 I do give up, however, in love, I come to you like a nymph.

5 scorched in the depths of your

6 fathers cradle I don’t see a heaven.

7 as the white doesn’t see me as clean.

8 I do give up, however, in battle.

9 Broken knee, the bones scarred by many lines

10 Tips pulled from many limbs of endurance, sutured creatures adorned with traces of

11 more fight than flight.

12 Buoyant packs of dehiscent bodies line my memories.

13 Maybe I’m over braiding my fate.

14 Overhead overheard the whispers of mortal creatures

15 unmortal. Slime green with an envy you wouldn’t dare to

16 cloak. Yes, just like everyone else

17 I have picked at the scab of my full heart

18 to see it splinter into traces of

19 stringed belongings. Washed up on the shores of my lovers hip.

20 Lapped by the deep blue tongue.

21 Today I’m pressed, like a woman who knew

22 but forgot for sanity in the unsafety.

23 Beached in the unsafety.

24 Tattooed and tartaned in the unsafety

25 I seek plaid holding no association with a historic clan.

26 Today I’m restored, as if I’d made peace with death.

27 Listen, the yellowed corners of my pages turn to brown

28 to black as I ask: are you looking at how you’ve become

29 two? In the space race for the failure in everything.

30 Perhaps I failed at nothing since I didn’t try for nothing but

31 gladiator streams of mirrored unconscious. Nonsense.

32 Cloaked nonsense you thought you saw in me but

33 it was my twin, my kin joint hipped amongst it all.

34 I say this all to say

35 to be awash in your pink means I suffocate in my brown.

– Collection as seen in words by Rhea Dillon for Ottolinger