Cristina Correa
Constellation
After María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Constellation, 2004, instant color prints
This is the hair-bound head that centers us like the star we look for when we’re lost.
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Growing indelicate as decades-ignored wildflowers, strands reach out in every direction, as the milky body pulls away. Our perspective changes. We still don’t know if we’re in the dark, or if the darkness is us. These things have been said to Death—does it listen?
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A system of braids is a system of chains strong enough to hang a history from. A spirit is a plank loosed in search of unrecovered secrets. And we are simply learning the tight ropes the dark moon has sent, baffled by what becomes clear when we approach light.
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Twist and turn into the purple river, saturated as an eel. These electric lines are to climb, to hang from, to be hung by, to make and remake with our oily fingers. This is suspension; those are musical notes. There is the harp and the ear; the vein that runs through its own knots.
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There is a distant blackness above.
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A braid is a chain is a hook that comes for the floating head through pools of ancient dust. A chain that comes easily undone finds patches of illumination in its disorder.
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From above, this head, is how to see.