As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.

Tomorrow I’ll gain what life will lose: defeat of my body – of the teeming power of the body – that will disgorge its excess of blood and return me to myself, alone, cut off from all lineage and with no line of descent. Being done with this tension in my breasts. Done with the stigmata of your existence and all those that pass through me in the place where you cling. Done with being possessed like this, double-stitched, overlocked, woven into a web that covers me like a shroud. Tomorrow, it’s the women in my family, their tide of hemoglobin A, that I’ll abort. Once the pills are absorbed, I would wait to be delivered. Alone. Free of all lineage and with no line of descent. Eternal. The genesis and the lack. The apocalypse and its angel. Now and forever. The point zero. O.

Author: Isabelle Nicou
Publisher: Amphetamine Sulphate
Pages: 108pp
Size: 5.25 x 8
Notes: paperback
Release Date: 2021
ISBN: 978-1734316070