from “Coronary Artist”
Word count: 172
Paragraphs: 9
Custom has it that a woman gets up first to solve the dilemma of the burning moment.
You can smell the smoke answering the alarm.
And then you can’t smell anything over the family soundtrack, putting everything on
hold. One becomes an adult without knowing the details of how it was done, knowing
only which team you’re on, which hat corresponds to your glands.
Already this is an extinct culture, a culture of giants prone to the vertigo of silent
agreements and unenforceable contracts. The rocks in our beds belong to them. Their
sexual politics get the better of us sometimes and we are left with dream transcriptions
and delinquencies instead of passion outside the parentheses.
We make it to the crossroads only to come to a stop. The idea we harbor is subversive.
That there may be many moments in which we recognize the sources of our hunger,
falling out of the sky, a complete thought sung to our most visible selves.
Alison Saar, untitled woodcut, for Arcade by Erica Hunt (Kelsey St. Press, 1996).
Erica Hunt is the author of Jump the Clock (2020); Veronica: A Suite in X Parts (2019); Piece Logic (2002); Arcade (1996); and Local History (1993). Hunt is the co-editor with Dawn Lundy Martin of Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing (2018). Recent work includes collaborations with composers Marty Ehrlich, Ingrid Laubrock and Myra Melford. New work with composer John Aylward is forthcoming in 2026.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores the multiplicity of African diasporic experiences and Black female subjectivity. In her public installations, sculptures, and prints, she often transforms traditional and found materials into totemic pieces that evoke mythology and collective memory. Her awards include the David C. Driskell Prize, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment Fellowship, and the United States Artists Fellowship.