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John Gilgun Horn |
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In Dooley’s studio— objects he’s found by the 102 River: a bison’s horns, the backbone of
a mastodon, petrified wood. And part of the skull of an elk with two broken horns. “See where the primitive people scooped out the marrow. four thousand years ago.” And there are the marks of a stone tool on both horns, cylindrical, engineered with
single minded precision. And here is where the human tongue went in. Yes, here is where the tongue went in, pink as the blossoms of water mint or red bartsia. That tongue paused for a second here to savor the soft vascular fatty
substance. “I think it was a woman’s tongue,” Dooley says. “That she was given priority because she was revered in that
group.” I see her licking her chapped lower lip, with the tip of her tongue. Three drops of elk’s blood have fallen in the dark space between her
breasts. She is wearing a bracelet of bone fragments and they clash together as she extends her arm to pass the horns to the man hunkered down beside
her. I notice that she is pregnant. So the marrow is nourishing the embryo. She looks like a stone with a mouth that is black and empty now though blood-sticky at the
corners of the lips. The elk’s left eye, paralyzed in death, panic stricken in its final moments, stares up in shock at her. The elk has no right eye, only a bleeding socket. The woman has just swallowed the right eye. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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