After a Studio Visit with Ahuva S. Zaslavsky

printed in Initial Magazine

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Ceramic ringlets, a downed whale. The ocean rises up, pushes the weight away, drags it back. A cylinder, a spool, a shape that gapes for eyes—the whale is dead, has been dead for days. Where it’s hollowed, how it bends and ends with the tide: come see the body ineluctable without bone, mingled in sargassum.¹ Come see the beached golem: God’s Real Name unearthed, placed in the mouth.² Ringlets, even history itself, materializes in intervals.³ You called them relations, traceable and exacting, with center. And I, genuflected, read “retaliations,” wanting (in the amount of entire desire), differentiation—an interference. Your hand pins repetition, programs patterning, and it is not the same as law.⁴ Vessels parlay each exhibit. From flesh to bone to fluorescent dancer: arms breech air while others wait their cue, leaning against an iteration of another intimation that will pass. Terracotta-colored garments grip dancers to tall vessels, in curious intimacy they brush fingertips around the orifice, look remotely through holes as if a gentle wind through the breast. A