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The End of History

‘The right to hxstory is the right to know. / I need to know how my mind is theft. / My body is property because my mind is theft. / I say “woman” and I can still move my mouth.’

By Kristine Sloan

 

 

The End of History

 

I’ve found myself here, which is to say nowhere.

It’s almost like fate, the way I’m no one.

Not fate as predetermined ghost, but fate as nowhere else to go.

There’s only one place to go. Call it transcendence.

The right to live is the right to hxstory.

When narratives become nerves.

Trauma writes the body into damage.

I speak hxstory from my body from my damage.

Emergence of pulse, possible to reconstruct the neural.

Changing the self takes time takes labor.

Time plus labor is a short-lived outcome.

Stopping, hurting, shortness of breath.

Mapping out a deadening of eyes.

Hurt opens time as time opens our bodies.

My body is a thousand islands and no time.

Ancestral memory is ocean-other, the white space.

Materialism, which is to say the page isn’t neutral.

No choice but to turn this page into a map.

These words as islands, somatic and dialectic.

When they begin, when they end.

I don’t know the year of beginning and ending.

They stole the year of beginning and ending.

The right to hxstory is the right to know.

I need to know how my mind is theft.

My body is property because my mind is theft.

I say “woman” and I can still move my mouth.

They say “never forget” but I can’t move my mouth.

What stays, what recedes.

What they stole lies on a grid.

This grid, the orchestration of purity.

Universality of essential narrative.

The trauma of essential narrative.

The right to know is the right to destroy.

They keep my trauma in a museum.

On a pedestal in a museum.

This is timeless this is beauty this is purity.

I need to know how this is theft.

To be housed in glass means shortness of breath.

When it began, when it will end.

I can’t breathe without this meaning.

How to make meaning in White space.

Speak to take back what lies on their grid.

Mapping out a deadening of lives.

My body is memory, ocean-other, no time.

The nerve to take what belongs to me.

Call it transcendence. Call it destruction.

The right to destroy is the right to hxstory.