with REGENESIS: AN OPERA TENTACULAR (ACT 1)
a video by RIEKO WHITFIELD
I am home sick
from work with the usual
upheaval
Bulge bubble and groan I
threaten to burst
Troubled belly bowels
of migraine, menstruation
a stupid chorus
Spirals retinal
plummets gutted, anal
All morning I crunch out
with my knees the sun and double
two terrible tender worlds
One: in which I am universal
particulate-ly quantum
slurry of sky and the surgeon’s knife
Another: in which I am nothing
but slime bowel and bloody fingers
On the toilet
in the shower I say
It is too soon and otherwise indecent to speak of the baby in my sister’s belly who has ceased to be a surety and has become, to my aural eye, an anti-periphery.
Almost baby memory baby of
the obituary
Such a neat plot the outskirts
of mournful visits
on and on into a photograph of obscurity
The baby’s name stone
furrowed pinched timeline furrowed
I see with dappled prediction
divisive vision
My sister, her husband
Who will run out of tending
a stone
She, my feathered sister
who will never not
and the already toddler trends
Hairstyles again and seasons
to resent Sundays.
I am no Åga cloudsaying
it’s the nausea
spiraling me
Inside the magic box tilting
a lilt dumb chorus
Doubling back
one sister, or another a nestling
pine siskin or its fallen sibling
Blind in one eye crouched
at the base of double redwood(s)
And still
flapping, flapping
Sonar echoes congenital heart
disease a birth defect
NICU open- heart surgery
On the tile cold floor
eye pressed to grout
The chorus infinite asks
What does it feel like to carry a death
inside your belly?
I vomit bitter and flush,
urge my wings upward stratospheric
All the little bodies a strata layering
earth’s millennia pattern a phrase:
Isn’t this the fate of all mothers?
The baby becomes narrowed vessels
leaky atria
A team, a whole host
will be there to receive
a five-pound patient
Sternum saw
all the miraculous little instruments
What kind of aunti am I
such thoughts
of troubled Spinus I could chit
To bear children in this world is to imagine the same satin whether
cradle or coffin.
REGENESIS: AN OPERA TENTACULAR
Regenesis: An Opera Tentacular is a three-act speculative mythology of cyclical life, death, and community inspired by the Shinto deity of creation and destruction, set in a world healing from the apocalypse.
In Act I the deity is summoned from a purgatory of forced silence to the ruins of a world she once created. She laments our violent rupture from ancestral knowledge and yearns for embodied connection.
Dreaming, screaming, and dying to be heard, Act I expresses a raw desire for tenderness and care toward our macrocosmic selves.
– Rieko Whitfield
LEHUA TAITANO writer
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer Chamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam), familian Kabesa yan Kuetu, and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-Fifth Century. She is the author of Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
RIEKO WHITFIELD artist
Japanese-American Rieko Whitfield weaves immersive worlds with speculative mythologies through performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, painting, music, and text. Her non-linear storytelling decenters narratives of Western capitalist individualism to move towards beyond-human collectivism.
She has exhibited in and worked with institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, the Saatchi Gallery, the Wellcome Collection, Gasworks, IMT Gallery, Harlesden High Street, and NN Contemporary.
Whitfield is an MA graduate of the Royal College of Art and the founder of London-based performance art platform Diasporas Now.
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