The Nerves: Annik
The following is an excerpt from Lee Suksi’s upcoming book, The Nerves, which is available September 24, 2020 from Metatron Press. Fifteen percent of proceeds from pre-order sales will be donated to the Toronto Encampment Support Network.
ANNIK
Annik gets excited covering other people’s faces. Loaves of bread, silk scarves, their own with a hand if you try to get a picture. They have a sunny face, a bright face like a fried egg. It’s fast to worry about getting caught. I consent to mugging in front of them when people want to take pictures of us together, matching sweetly as we do in gesture and concern. Matching hats. I’ve always loved the camera, the opportunity to briefly act with the viewer’s knowledge. So often when you act nobody recognizes the performance.
Annik likes to acknowledge their performing too, but with props. They love their sunglasses, duvet pulled up over the eyebrow, laundry dumped in a boiling heap over them as they recline reading after work, will even grab my arm and throw it over their face when they’re tired of speaking about a subject.
We dawdle on like this, me vogueing and them browsing, occasionally the reverse when their face is lit up by a vista they like, a photo of an open face they take, a turn of phrase in their ear.
One time I think I catch Annik lying about something important and I howl at them with my full force, waving my arms like a dance teacher, trying to unearth that anxious expression from beneath their rose-printed ball cap. With their big arms honed by pull-ups, they lift me up off of my feet, spin me to face the fluorescent light in the ceiling of their apartment, so even I’m backlit, howling and kicking at the artificial sun.
Poetry
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September 17,
2020
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5-minute
read
My pussy is a flashlight in a hole. My erection is a foghorn tucked badly. My asshole is the kitchen drain enjoying some spinach. My face might be stuck in the snow. I lie on my hand to make it numb then get myself to come a lot pretending my hand is anybody else’s: the purple field of strangeness and desperation. The red field of will. In the wide space of dust, tools, bureaucratic forms, cruel beliefs, exorcisms and failures: the truth can be the wet spot in my underwear. I’m drawing a map to relief with my own hand. The relief is the non-toxic lake of a cartoon of heaven. The cartoon heaven where I lay to rest.
Lee Suksi
has lived in Toronto for a decade. Their writing has mostly appeared as texts accompanying exhibitions or read at galleries, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cooper Cole, Georgia Scherman Projects, Susan Hobbs, Towards, The Table, and Calaboose. They’ve presented at Doored, Images Festival and Blackwood Gallery. The Nerves is their first book.