You tell me where to begin

There’s little to say and even less to eat in this house, I think while you

wield the whetted sword of dialectics above both sex and war.

My foredoomed/fruitless attempts to remove entrapped erotics

from underneath the bell jar of desire.

Failure

the shortest form of longing

in times in which I can’t even eat, think, or fuck without getting abdominal pain.

A lot of things are the enemy.

Heiress to unquantified means of doubt

I’m dealing in the currency of faded memories I can only

ill afford.

Worshipping at the altar of language

only receiving riddled advice

prophecies and omens

I decide to ignore/cast away.

For many months I lived most comfortably

inside the words of others

inside the walls of syntactic gaps of coherence.

Speaking with a razor blade underneath my tongue

every theoretical thought dies leaving my mouth.

Apart from this

I started losing parts of myself, disassembling,

leaving them behind where I went.

My hat on a plane to Edinburgh, my scarf in a pub in London

my socks at a lover’s place, my virginity in a club/toilet stall,

my faith in the face of religion, my sanity inside the fortress of unpaid labour and bills,

my health in the rotten and wound intestines of capitalism,

my mind.

There’s nothing to eat in this house.

And here I am gathering the epitomised remnants of sanity

into my leathery purse.

Seeing a pigeon feasting on an unidentifiable animal’s remains

I’m reminded of my mother

this could mean something but probably doesn’t.

Maybe it all began with the smell of detergent wipes.

Please, read me a manual on how to survive

or read me at least a beginning.

Katharina Ludwig is a writer, researcher, artist, and sometimes poet based in Berlin and London. Her/their work is concerned with narrative holes and the insurrectionary poetics of the 'wounded text'. Katharina’s work has been published, shown, performed, and read internationally, by a.o. 3am Magazine, Zeno Press, Tripwire Journal, Strings Magazine, Ma Bibliothèque and Nightboat Books (forthcoming). In addition to her/their own practice Katharina works on editorial, curatorial, and educational projects and is the co-editor of Vortext, a poetry mail subscription magazine.