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Christine Hamm

[How to Finish the End Paper]

Passage VII by Fabien Beuchet

I wake up and I find: A red thread holding everything together. The walls connected to the windows. My bed stitched to the floor and chairs. Triangles everywhere. There’s a movie where two twins fight at summer camp, and one of the girls wakes up, finding her room this way. Also, honey is involved. That was Lindsey, before her rehabs and sex tapes. I try to go back to sleep, find the more interesting part of this dream. There’s a white paper woman sitting across from me, naked, with a shaved head, her eyes closed. Her skin is crumpled paper, but also looks like butcher paper, with hesitating, penciled lines. She is covered in dried flowers – pink geraniums, yellow daisies. I wonder what the flowers are trying to say to me. Now stripes of ragged colors advance, too bright, too big.

 

About the writer:
Christine E. Hamm (she/her), queer & disabled English Professor, social worker and student of Ecopoetics, has a PhD in English, and lives in New Jersey. She recently won the Tenth Gate prize from Word Works for her manuscript Gorilla. She has had work featured in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly and many others.

Image: Passage VII by Fabien Beuchet (contemporary). Gouache on paper. 16 x 12 inches. 2017. By permission. Fabien Beuchet is an artist, teacher, and art critic from France. He is currently developing an international life project made of painting, photography, art history, and art criticism to allow us to build bridges of creativity across media.

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporationsupporting writers and artists worldwide.

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