Benjamin Bellas
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Fickle Fingers in the Underbrush

     This body is not a voice. This voice is not an opera. This opera is not an autopsy. My
trachea is not the source of the wind that makes your hair flutter just so. Just so. In the
autumn, there is a rumor that buzzes through the kingdom of insects. Static & fuzz &
fucking & drugs– a hymn is whatever sound you make in the pursuit of pure ecstasy. If
god is real, then she is a being that built me for believing that pleasure is a name cried
out just to feel it reverberate through the calcified parts of my body. Oh Lord, if there is
a season for disappearing then it is measured in glaciation, in rising tides, in limestone
dissolving. Take me to the cave with paintings depicting a moment in history, when it
was impossible for humanity to imagine living beyond the body’s ability to function.
Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira. Expression leaps outside of the body when the world is just
that dangerous; leaps out and into materials more suitable for the self-preservation of a
suffocating history– limonite, yellow ochre, hematite, charcoal, burnt bones, red ochre
, grounded calcite, and umber. The possibility exists that hidden everywhere under the
crust that form the continents, rests another sky painted by the hands of Cro-magnons,
for I have learned that the earth has a PHD in containment & obliteration. I have learned
that the best prisons are the ones we design for ourselves in the name of education. I have
yearned to become a master of incarcerating architecture, but I am just a city planner in
a society obsessed with recidivism. Just think, the public is locked out of Lascaux because
the awe of our collective breath was destroying it. Hold that as I absorb the surgical
sounds of the brown pelicans becoming scalpels in the shallow ocean off Islamorada,
where they vanish for a moment, becoming violent machinations in the heavens of a
world less familiar, but no less alive & dying.

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Benjamin Bellas currently lives in Miami, Florida. His works are forthcoming or have been published/exhibited in The Broadkill Review, Qu Literary Magazine, Fives (A Companion to Denver Quarterly), The Pinch, Cadillac Cicatrix, Drain Magazine, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; la Space, Hong Kong; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki.
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