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A crotch, a pelvic area, a middle, we start at the middle, we all start here. Is covered by white cotton shorts. Fruit of the Loom. Fruits of the cotton industry, fruits of slave labour, fruits of graft by forced working hands. To create a blank canvas, fresh white cotton sheets, an under layer, a barrier of something natural spun into a symbol of cleanliness. People who work don’t wear white. People who go out and dance all night in a white t-shirt get the whole night marked in pathways across their bodies. People who get forced out of or into environments get pockets of places stuck in or removed from their bodies. Sometimes these bodies need a neutral layer, a protective base layer to survive. We’re born and then we react, we build what we can given what we’re offered and then we shift, refusing foundations that weren’t built for us, moving away. Birthing ourselves into new places, new environments again and again, letting everything go for a moment. But it’s all always there right with you, you wash it off daily. Your family worked and worked and walked, what happens when you stop? It runs through your nerves and bones and muscles like it’s catching up with you, a hundred years of being detached from a body by being made part of a machine. It sits with you now, a human full stop. Run away from the mines and sit on the beach, look up, look out, move sideways, stop stealing from the land to pay for your own broken back. Pull it over you like a blanket, the wealth lies in its connection within you.

birthbuildshift

I am between two rocks, between many bodies, genders, with seaweed and white sport sock appendages, penetrating and protruding from my ‘Man Store’ blue shiny shorts is a length of seaweed which sways with the swelling waters, I part my hair with the sea. There is a rock wedged in the crevice of the rock and I occupy the space below it, stop resisting, start floating, underground with the light of day ahead between Ithell Colquhouns legs in the bath. Double image, duality becomes plurality as masculinity and femininity dissolve into the saltwater and I am impregnated, birthed, moved, resisting, pushing, floating, ejaculating and swelling with the water

Packing