Category: words

Am I a horrible person
Am I selfish
Am I dying
Would my grandparents say
Where did my grandparents come from
Where did their beliefs come from
What will I regret in twenty years
Am I dying tomorrow
Am I lazy
How can I help another human with all of their interiority
Will my child learn how to live without me
Will he feel loved and know how to locate happiness
and how to reach for it
Will my child be ok
How long do we have together
All of us who love each other what do we get to keep
What portion Any of it
Using what I already have what can I eat
How does one prepare this strange vegetable
Can I ask an imaginary great grandparent how they would do it
What crucial step have I forgotten
Why haven’t I learned this yet
Can I prevent regret
What will stop the world’s insistent imploding
Does how I look become a portal into my self
Am I accurately communicating my values
through my home
How is this other human doing
How do other humans live
Am I doing this right

Hannah Stephenson

‘It’s whatever you want it to be,’ said my father
after he bisected My Little Pony and used her in a sculpture.
At bedtime he read me Kafka’s short fiction.

‘All men are not idiots,’ my mother advised,
‘but beware of Structuralists;
life will never be a matter of signifiers and signs.’

She gave up her copy of Some Day My Prince Won’t Come
with a dedication: ‘Darling, Don’t be limited
by propositional modes of representation! xx’

Preparation of Rich Cherry Genoa was methodological.
My father paraphrased Merleau-Ponty: ‘the toucher touching touched.’
His hands around the mixing bowl, she sifted sugar.

It helped them contextualise the relationship between Self
and Other. Phenomenology at the dinner table was not unusual.
My brother queried so-called ‘pepper’, so-called ‘ketchup’,

ingested as if objective fact. The colour ‘red’ is not universal.
Mainly, my sister slept at any hour.
‘See!’ said my mother,

‘The claim that all experience might be mediated by language
is one all women know to be preposterous.
And besides, Wittgenstein is dead.’

Over dessert, however, she absolved him
on account of her cake and his raisins. ‘It’s like Ludwig said,
raisins may be the best part of a cake

but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake.
My cake isn’t, as it were, thinned-out raisins,
as you will know from experience.’

Heather Phillipson, via