DOLLS / MEAT / AVILA

Dea Anne Martin

This is the surface left to us after we have used up everything else. It is for us to write on and to give a language in itself. It swallows us all like a wet mouth. Desire is written on it and speaks through it.

                                                   Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont
                                                   1783, Paris


It's all just parts...it's plastic.

                                                   Hans Bellmer
                                                   1937, Berlin


It isn't plugged in yet.

                                                   Venus Diogenes
                                                   1998, San Francisco

DOLLS

My brother and I used to play together with GI Joe and Barbie. One thing that we both really liked doing was dressing GI Joe up in clothes that belonged to girl dolls. Barbie's clothes didn't really fit him but sometimes we could manage squeezing him into something if it had as back zipper or buttons that we could leave undone. Our favorite outfit for Joe was a blue ballerina dress that actually belonged to a doll that was bigger than Barbie. We thought it ws great because first the dress fit perfectly but also because Joe seemed to look happier in it than he did in the other dresses we put on him. Playing with the dolls this way wasn't likje the other ways we would play together. Once Joe was in the ballerina dress or some other outfit, we didn't really do anything with him. We would just kind of look at him as though he would do something for us...like talk or start moving by himself. We'd laugh a little at first because he did look kind of strange with that haircut and the scar on his cheek but then we'd get really quiet. We didn't get tired of this for a long time.

He had shaved himself all over. His skin was smooth as plastic. "You do it for me," he said, so I pushed his testicles up into his body and pulled his penis back between his legs. I strapped the gaff around him. It was made out of a material that looked like metal against his skin. "Does that hurt?" "Yes," he said. "Touch me." I ran my palm over the lowest part of his stomach. I could feel his balls poking out like eggs waiting there...stretching against the skin.

She had a red sticky mouth and skin like a plate. When I kissed her, I could feel something hard coming up between her legs and pressing into me.

MEAT

The fact of muscle is baffling to me. My skin is blue in places fading out in others to yellow. These colors change and shift places like those on a map where the boundaries aren't stable. My skin is soft and I think of everything underneath it as soft like jelly. There are muscles in bodies...wrapped up in skin like the skins of catfish...like meat wrapped in plastic. I think about people in their real skins looking like frogmen in old movies all shiny and like the tightness of the skin could dissolve ay any moment and leave the muscles throbbing in light and air. I know from books that there are muscles that are long and provide resistance against bones but I don't believe that. I don't believe in muscles like that. There are muscles that impact and those that absorb. Bones have nothing to do with it. Bones get broken and bones don't have anything to do with muscles. Bones I understand.

See these places on my skin...I'm wearing a blue dress. The bracelets that I wear have nails sticking out and making a ring around my wrist. My life is precious to me. I know that you love me. You slide a needle in through the skin of my nipple and beyond. The rooms that we live in are smudged and scratched but my skin is white and my pain is clear. Do you love me? Will you turn me inside out? Leather and metal are common things. I want you to make them speak through me. Against my skin they get translated.

AVILA

When I was six I pierced my ears myself with a sewing needle and some thread. I pushed the needle through each lobe and then kept pulling until the thread went all the way through the hole. Then I left the thread there. It was red thread and it floated like blood vapor. What I did later was this: I put metal across my skin. I put pieces of metal across my skin. The metal was small grids and plugs and flat dense patterns that I had pulled out of the radios and terminals that I had opened up and gutted. I put it on my skin and made it stick there with white glue and when it was clinging to me I went out on the roof that I live underneath. I flattened one side of myself against the roof and then I flattened the other side. I walked around and then I sat for awhile. I was in the sun all the time because that's all that was there. There are places where the sun is close and you could eat it like an orange if you wanted to. I felt the metal growing into my skin. My skin was swelling around each piece of it. When the metal came off, the marks were on my skin like jewelry and I remembered a charm bracelet that I had once. Years ago, I had a picture of a hinge tattooed inside each of my elbows and on the back of each knee. My hinges are buried beneath my new skin. I think that pieces of the metal melted into me while I was in the sun. I think that the shadows that they left on me are twisting my organs around...changing their shapes so that they become reflections of what floats on the surface. My organs are floating beneath my skin re-written into shapes that I know. I could grow a metal skin, a glass penis with wires running through the inside connecting it to my spinal cord...a tiny camera sitting like another eye at the center of my forehead.

                                Dea Anne Martin
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