EDITING

I would like you to be normal now, one little mammal thinks to the other at breakfast. Breakfast is something called Carnation Instant Breakfast, which is like baby formula for children who do not want to eat breakfast. Or it is a banana. Those are the options. The other little mammal, the smaller one, will not put on her shoes. She is crying. I hate socks, she says. They feel horrible.  It is not a time for empathy. It is a time for quickness. The mother grabs a little foot. Wrestles it into a sock, pink with white lace. The little animal is also pink, with white lace. Her tears make her wet so she looks like a newborn puppy.  

(A certain book from the school library shows puppies being born. Out of the mother dog’s vagina. They all crowd around it at free choice library time. When it’s time to go back to the classroom the next student on the list gets to take it home for a whole week.)

-Domestication Handbook

when you say: have a good day what you mean is: i hope you still love me. when you say: i love you what you mean is: please still love me. when you say: give me a hug what you mean is: don’t be mad at me when you say: yes to anything someone says/wants what you mean is: please don’t die.

trying to think of configurations of animal/language questions: for instance the girl*/animal creature and the shaping of the creature by the sense of what’s going on around her: things that are not language and shape what her understanding of the functionality of language is, what words/grammatical constructions are available to her, or not. 

how domestication is a process carried out in the house, both with and beyond language. i want to foster a language for talking about mundane traumas that supersedes the language of self-help books which has not been helpful to me for reasons including that it rarely/if ever is consent-based and seems to preclude a nuanced understanding of personal/systemic agency. a vulnerability that is not about just being a girl/victim but that delineates a poetics of how to function/be(come) in any given system as a girl/creature

themes and images that recur: gestation/pregnancy; milk; dolls; suburban architecture and houses that are built in what used to be a forest (scrub pines and palmettos, cartoon green and gray/brown); children as animals; brutality and tenderness as mutually constituted and non-binary

* for notes on what i mean when i say girl please see this post