About Ethel

ABOUT ETHEL

Ethel’s dagger is a knife made out of flowers. She is cultivating an asp as she cultivates a Christ. Praying in the serpent’s field, she walks like a many-handed deer. With 1000 eyes, she is wolf-faced in the forest and wears small bells.

Are there lights shining on these pages? she asks. (She can’t see past her many thousand eyes). If her language is incomprehensible, she rings the small bells and approaches as if in a

searchlight.

In the orchard, she embroiders a film which evokes a repulsive figure. I’m as inconsolable as a relic, she says, then preforms a type of miracle where she digs a small hole and fills it with everyone’s butter.

She renounces all sinister flowers.

Once, in the Midwest, a garnet serpent entered her sleep. It carried her through an entire riot, a funeral march protest and the manifestation of an incurable illness—and still she looks absent in every photograph.

In the chapel-pit, she approaches the dogs and howls. In a celebration of poverty, she approaches the cup like she approaches the herd—pigeon-toed and swallowing feathers.

This is my scripture, she says, leafing through the employment ads, AND this is my folly. She makes friends with the modern worms and renounces hypnogogic visions. I have a luxurious neurosis, she says, taking off and putting on her veil, taking up and renouncing:

- her ancient terror of applesauce
- her heatstroke
- and her self-induced coma.