“In the Event of my Death,” or “Monday, January 1992.”
Issue 13
https://manyworlds.place/issue-13/greer/
by Greer
Collage created with cut-outs from magazines, instruction manuals, flyers, and paint samples taped onto sepia-toned paper. In the top left is a large purple rectangle; taped to it is poem made from cutout, mismatched pieces of text, which reads:
DO NOT touch ME
DESTROY all images of MY face
Return my body
to THE Earth
on a warm,
early Spring day
To the left of the rectangle is a cutout of a header which reads:
MONDAY JANUARY 1992
In the top right are two cloud-shaped cutouts of paper with text on them. The words legible on the bottom cloud read:
Movement
looking back
I behold
held fast
Some of the words legible on the top cloud read:
pain
confront the power
stutter
better than-
and God in anger
In the bottom left is the cutout shape of a seated figure. Some of the legible text on its body reads:
bleeding
Ibuprofen
symptom
healing
them
Underneath the figure are two wings made of dried, pressed petals. The figure’s head is a cutout illustration of green ivy. The figure sits atop a photograph of a garden, which spans the bottom of the collage.
In the bottom right is a cutout of a high-contrast illustration of two hands clasped in prayer. Taped underneath the hands is a circular image of neural pathways, and two squares, one yellow, one orange.
Collage created with cut-outs from magazines, instruction manuals, flyers, and paint samples taped onto sepia-toned paper. In the top left is a large purple rectangle; taped to it is poem made from cutout, mismatched pieces of text, which reads:
DO NOT touch ME
DESTROY all images of MY face
Return my body
to THE Earth
on a warm,
early Spring day
To the left of the rectangle is a cutout of a header which reads:
MONDAY JANUARY 1992
In the top right are two cloud-shaped cutouts of paper with text on them. The words legible on the bottom cloud read:
Movement
looking back
I behold
held fast
Some of the words legible on the top cloud read:
pain
confront the power
stutter
better than-
and God in anger
In the bottom left is the cutout shape of a seated figure. Some of the legible text on its body reads:
bleeding
Ibuprofen
symptom
healing
them
Underneath the figure are two wings made of dried, pressed petals. The figure’s head is a cutout illustration of green ivy. The figure sits atop a photograph of a garden, which spans the bottom of the collage.
In the bottom right is a cutout of a high-contrast illustration of two hands clasped in prayer. Taped underneath the hands is a circular image of neural pathways, and two squares, one yellow, one orange.
Greer is a first-generation college graduate who has lived in the Deep South, then Berlin, and, now, Dublin. So far he hasn’t done much with his degrees, or his art, but we’ll see how it all shakes out for him. If he’s not doing housework or applying to jobs, he’s probably collecting trash to cut up and tape to a piece of paper. You can email him at greerble@gmail.com to check if he’s done anything worthwhile since publication.