I was just having a panic attack so I drank a glass of magnesium. What substance do you write to? Some write to whiskey some write to beer some write to black tea some write to heroin. More should write to magnesium. Magnesium. Atomic number 12. I read magnesium is the ninth most abundant element. What do we ever want if it isn’t Mineral? I take the magnesium for panic. I pour water into the powder and it fills the glass milky white.

An old friend texts me,

I become the cloud, like my drink. I am many I am floating I am apart from time. Why the panic? Where does the panic come from? Directionless motivation? The desire for perfection? The chemicals? The body having enough with capitalist hegemony?

I want to go back. I am listening to D’Angelo and he says “I just wanna go back, baby/ Back to the way it was”. That too is what I want. Where is the womb? I want to be fed with a cord. Go back, go back to the womb. What is this woman? What is the panicked woman? Who is she floating over there. When I have a panic attack, I become the floor.

This is not a weakness, but a gathering. The panic brings me to the floor. It forces me to part with language I do not know what is happening with my body. My heart is beating fast. This is me  post-language. Virginia Woolf said her first memory was the feeling of “lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow”. In a panic I return to the grape. My ways of seeing shift and I am in a body apart from the productive world. I can’t make anything, I can’t say anything, I can only wait. In the grape I am not made from memory. I am only present with color. From this space, a poem emerges.

Slowly I return to the world and I read Rosmarie Waldrop: “There remains an ultimate gap, as between two people, that not even a penis can’t bridge”. The absence is not a negative. Where the gap is the poem is there also.  Waldrop can never get around the body. The body manifests through the disconnect of language. “Whenever you’re surprised that I should speak your language I am suddenly wearing too many necklaces and breasts”. She seems to be positioning herself as the other (the absence/her body) so it isn’t surprising that she (the other) is also seen as untranslatable in this specific poem. When her language is mis-understood, her body multiplies. Like a Yayoi Kusama piece, her gendered body multiplies and fills the room. Why fill the absence? Why insist on penetration? Why gestate? Why not abort? Refusal to be filled creates a powerful body that will not leave the room. The body doesn’t demand to be understood, only seen for the moment the X axis crosses the Y.

The thing with magnesium is if you drink too much you will shit yourself. The thing with the panic is it can be the release. If you don’t allow people to panic nothing will happen. If you allow people to panic you allow bodies to fall apart and disconnect from time. People deny the panicked body because it’s doesn’t coexist with Capital.  The best thing I did was fall over. In the snow. In the milky white. I was caught but I felt the fall, the absence of time, & the floating grape. This is not powerlessness. This is not weakness.