Tight Turns

Abstract

The plain text was task-oriented in a roundabout way, providing detailed instructions for how NOT to build an elaborate sequence of bridges, each one bound to produce, according to chapters one through twenty-three, disastrous results. Graphic novels disguised as illuminated letters twisted the tent-dwelling decipherer into painful self-recognition. The flashlight followed the phases of the moon.

Meanwhile one strand of marginalia, written in anxious back-slant, pleaded for some kind of adjustable form for managing the confluence, especially during flood season. I like what we came up with. 'We' is a little big word. In fact the tent turns out to be one of those Borgesian core-tech structures allowing for astonishing internal expansion. There's not much we didn't get in there and not much in there that didn't get us.

So I suppose that's it. This tent. This confluence. These children who found me here, turned text into life and made life home.

How to Cite

Sutherland, J., (2013) “Tight Turns”, Studies in the Maternal 5(1), 1-10. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.136

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Getting pregnant was like moving into a tent erected at the confluence of Time and Eternity. On a nearby post I found a life buoy attached to a length of rope, and a cellar of salt. Inside the tent a flashlight hung above a text knee deep in pensive, bossy, sometimes hysterical interlineal and marginal glosses. No brook murmuring? Whitewater bubble-gaffe! Leap!! Look!!!

The plain text was task-oriented in a roundabout way, providing detailed instructions for how NOT to build an elaborate sequence of bridges, each one bound to produce, according to chapters one through twenty-three, disastrous results. Graphic novels disguised as illuminated letters twisted the tent-dwelling decipherer into painful self-recognition. The flashlight followed the phases of the moon.

Meanwhile one strand of marginalia, written in anxious back-slant, pleaded for some kind of adjustable form for managing the confluence, especially during flood season. I like what we came up with. 'We' is a little big word. In fact the tent turns out to be one of those Borgesian core-tech structures allowing for astonishing internal expansion. There's not much we didn't get in there and not much in there that didn't get us.

So I suppose that's it. This tent. This confluence. These children who found me here, turned text into life and made life home.

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Jenifer Sutherland

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