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CASTING
by Lily Moskowitz

They coated you Purple until the Purple became very hard and for sixty seven minutes you were locked inside of it, your limbs lost all feeling, they coated it over your lips and your nose and your perfect nipples and it held you in a close form, the Purple the only sensation until they peeled you out and you welped like a small child.

It was agonizing to be born, the substance did not want to let go of you or the shape you made inside of it, clinging and crooked and cloned, this is what it wanted, the Purple, to make another one of you inside its silicone cast, stripped of features devoid of finance a holy fucking form.

Mother Purple Mother Mary Mother, she took your breath for your curvature and ripped your likeness clean out, the essence and the follicle, her C section in claymation, a terrible squelch.

You hear a trancebeat through her heavy mean skin, there is a party outside and the people don’t know you are birthing in here, their ragged cheeks and rancid denim performing labor of a different kind while you are vaguely amalgamating into Something that looks exactly like you but isn’t, your wrinkle your cosine your dimension misinformed, that’s what the Purple makes you do, bastardize, and inside of it of Her you crumple, you blister, you perforate at the lines, she draws them and presses down so you fit into her organ system like the biblical figure who goes inside the whale, if you could only remember his name but you are too busy replicating within the Purple, the finite destination.

It’s like that, the Purple. A cathedral. You beg you brine you ferment, feel the heat crawl downwards and you can forgive yourself, you never did anything wrong, at the instruction of a higher power you have faith in something at last. 

You hum an organ’s choir, nearing operatic it flushes you to sainthood, so pardoned and so simple, you are pleased at yourself with only one demand.

You breathe through a very thin straw placed sideways in your very lush mouth. It clogs and catches and for a second or century you have no oxygen at all, you are poreless and permanent and paralyzed cause actually you can’t breathe and the Purple isn’t listening but the people outside are still listening to techno music in a Purple of their own that makes them new, that makes them born and burnt and beautiful, yes we are all so justified in the colors we suffocate with dignity inside of, we asked for them, invited, blessed, bountiful, shaping dilating becoming one thing or another. Eternity comes in and out, dizzy, you are squirming now, without air, you would like to have some but the Purple just won’t let up, relentless, she is, the Thing drawing the borders where your body ends and she begins and it’s unintelligible now, the perimeter between the two of you.

You begin to sink, to squeal, you are maybe seriously suffocating in here, in the Purple, on your knees and indecipherable, mutating, nearing unconscious, Purpling, just like she wanted you to, blurring into her own lines, it’s delicious and grotesque how little you can think locked into her, a complete embrace, you know nothing but the Once of where you are together, the thought the totality the moment, the vision already black is Blacking, you are both a bit afraid, unsure that you can survive what it is to Purple, there are plastics and polymers that might perish you, that might cast parentheses around the present, but above or beyond that you are erupting, molten, volcanic, past the point of breathing or breathless you’re just Purple, exactly as she asked you to be, Purple, you really love the color, incandescent, something near blood, you gulp it and gulp it and gulp, you’ve never been sweeter or so feverish, you know exactly what you want, one inextinguishable need, 

To Purple.

To Purple so bad, this bad, that exactly right amount of bad where the relief of it is sexual, fucking grand, ecstatic, watch the lights burst inside your eyelids and it’s god isn’t it, the opening the rupture the threshold, its astonishing nearness, how it holds so precious upon the hour, how Purple, how pretty to look at, like glory molting alive she yawns, she sputters, shivers, you are ripping through an impossible seam, tunneling, condensating carbonating amputating stinging seared—



She spits you out.

You’re the smoothest you’ve ever been. So smooth you sleep, dreamless, flattened into a creamy straight lined heat, high above the ground and her room and the place where they made Purple, that’s where you wake up, zoomed in at the sky where it breaks into just regular air. You stick your hand out, you squeeze the fishing wire that separates the One from the Other and the division makes a small Zing when touched, its vibration rattling plaster and feathers from your body, stray pieces catching music on wind, catching a somehow blurred photograph of you, taken months ago, your face turned away towards an orb of Green. You reach for the picture but the page flaps in a hazardous direction, just as this one will, as they all do eventually. You reach for the picture but you with your new Purple skin are too shiny to grasp, your waxen arms and frictionless fingertips dislocated from all arrangement, a slippery lamination rendered helpless, you, awoken, here, palms nose belly up towards the Blue, a haphazard divine, you, strewn and stripped and hurricaned, you, surrounded, by loose, mistaken papers of your very own face.