A Bridge

I.

You peel a strip of paper like an apple skin, in one long curve with the blade of a knife, throw it behind your shoulder, make a prediction. The skin predicts her face: eyes large and dark, small mountains swallowing the moon. Her hair, black, layered like her paintings, hard to define. The mouth forms itself into a pod, speaks a sentence that could be cut from a Dada poem, I threw a bridge, as if making a link between the real and imagined, memory in present tense, her many transformations.

II.

You try to make an approximation of her, paper grooves loop around her eyes, nose, the way her neck disappears into a symbolic void. Black ink traces her outline, yet only a name to be recognized by. Such intensity in those spherical eyes, the intimacy of space, of a life lived, of time still to pass. Her face isolated, removed from context as though she were the only thing to matter, a way of working out what she means or how she wishes to be understood.

III.

You have captured her as shapeshifter; herself but not quite. She is in-between what you saw and what you remembered, a bridge between selves. You touch her eyebrows and curve them over her lids. J’ai jeté un pont, she repeats again, just as you press a finger to her chin. When you take your finger away, a thin papery line links you both together.

IV.

When she was younger, she painted herself with the same intense stare as she has when she looks at you now, and you find, invariably, that her eyes lead you in through their surface, deep into burrows of endlessly opening thresholds; a kind of trick of imagination or knowing what it is to be on the cusp of something strange and new. She is many years older now. And still, she is a person you try to decode.

V.

It is not as if you, yourself have not wished to transform, or else to be unbodied. Yet, somehow you have never managed it. You ask her how she does it. I threw a bridge, she says, which is to say she always wanted to reach the impossible, esoteric, the hard to define. The world of dreams seeps into the waking hours, holds them together with the bristles of a paint brush. She holds out a hand for yours, links your fingers together, creates a bridge.

Rochelle Roberts is a writer, poet and editor based in London. Her writing has been published by Prototype, Arusha gallery, recessed.space and Birmingham Literary Journal, amongst others, and in the books Cusp: Feminist Writings on Bodies, Myth & Magic (Ache, 2021) and Anne-thology: Poems Re-presenting Anne Shakespeare (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). She is editor at the international arts publisher Prestel and at the feminist-surrealist magazine The Debutante.