Pearl paints orthodox icons in her mom’s fifth story apartment, placed at the corner of two busy streets and the middle of a fermented eddy of busy air. There’s this expectation of ascent (from prayer, from stairs), that you’ll be climbing up out from the carbody traffic of the world’s surface, getting a breather from its sour density. But here in this smogged city, five flights up you’re still weighed down in the oyster cloud and kept feeling like street-level always. And you're fat with your own smudged breath, which takes a lot of poof to push out of the chest, the neck, through the face, to howl it back into its toxic gray womb: polluted world.
Pearl tells me her hairbrush is always accumulating a dark residue, little flecks of grayish soot accumulate on the mat and the bristles each time she runs it through her hair. The carpet underneath her wooden chair is this way too, live and singed, the tips of its twist-cream hairs darkening black always like tarnishing in the smogged oxygen. [Atomic redox, synthetic metamorph, enzymatic turn, electric sludge]. Her mother [quiet sitting deep oiled chimney stack lovely force] tells me when she blows her nose it always leaves black in the tissue, making her feel like she’s letting something really corpsey out, like expelling a rot she didn't know she held inside.
Pearl paints her icons with a clench of three hard fingers around a brush on the vertical, dipping in and out of bleary puddles of egg tempera paint. The puddles hover in small ceramic bowls, a stewing lotion of powdered pigments, water, liquid myrrh, a drop of vinegar, egg yolk, and the air. I watch pearl hold her breath on the dip of the brush, and exhale as she releases the paint onto her canvas. The dips down and out happen with the thickness of getting sunk and heaving up in a gelled world.
The halos of the icons must always be gilded. For the gold leaf to adhere good to the surface you have to breathe heavy down on it. Pearl drinks hot tea before breathing out onto her icons, her mouth a steamer, a potent, polluted, devout, focused life-force enfolding airred wetness through the paint.
Pearls supposed to be opalescent but she's very grayed from all the fifth floor dwelling. Exposed to the hot lower latitudes of the season, she hales ex and hales in as a lightheaded wheel. She fasts and prays and brushes her hair and paints around the air like the spin of a snore. I feel this fifth floor’s a gulping, churning plate. In the frothed simmer of this place, she culls icons out of a plane, breathing her intoxicated life into their laminated bodies. It’s a caustic time, a mess, this season. Pearl, mother, God, smog, five stories, a soot city, carbodies and all these lungs. This three dimensional life is folded together by particulates with attitude. Our respiration dumb and unfound, taking mucked up breaths and breathing out to secure gilded halos, deranged with a stubborn confidence about our ability to see through the air. Even climbed up flights up stairs, we’re never escaping the fevered splay of particulates, the gray acre thrills of these big lungs of the world, spread and profuse, convulsing gray.
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