ZEO
Once a foreign body in my own life, I have decided to remodel
this mobile home of mine into suitability.
I am darning all the god-made holes in a contrasting colour.
Sometimes it feels like everyone is growing backwards.
I am tired of marrow-minded people
who bury their heads in the soil
to avoid new propagations
and how they stare at me
as if I am stood naked in a greenhouse
outrageously, like an installation artist
occupying their village turf.
There is a public ruckus about me.
Constantly, I must scrape out the opinions
that get stuck under my fingernails
and support from the audience feels adjacently awkward.
I am not enjoying the process of
shelling myself like edamame.
I thought it would feel like freedom
but it feels more like becoming easier to swallow.
‘Ongoing act of performance’
‘Church service’
Let thaumaturgic theatre begin:
my body is an artefact of sin.
And which sin would that be? Horrific configuration of the feminine, a defiling soil,
soiled by the fact of my birth. They don’t care whether I’m a rib or a side. Either way,
it’s a half to their whole. Something they own. I am the second make, made for his sake.
We were cleaved and rent apart at some point, and there is no chance of our
bones knitting together again.
See me, here, standing outside their church.
I am something of a mote, a moot point.
They deem me unworthy and unresolved – which is it? – and, apparently, he can do something
about that. He packages me neatly in 114, rolled up between the lines.
I can be smoked after dinner like tobacco. I can be shaped like proverbial clay in their hands, for
their purposes, but something tells me that I won’t see the light of the kiln.
Tired of this language of reinscription.
Tired of the in-between, both/and, neither/nor,
or never being what they want in ways that matter.
I find myself drawn to God like a moth to a lamp. Please, tell me what the kingdom of heaven is
like. I don’t trust them to describe it truthfully. I sought, sort between what is theirs
and what is God’s. But I cannot find where one ends and the other begins. And what
does it mean to be alike? Likeness is found in self-reference, I think. And I do not see myself in
the church. See me, here, living in a lukewarm body, ready to be moulded
into whichever sinner they want.
‘Self-portrait as Mary Magdalene’
ZEO is a multimedia artist based in Oxford and London. Their practice centres on self-portraits, poetry comics and family photographs salvaged from house clearances. ZEO’s work plays with scripture, dreamscapes and amplified internal monologues, exploring subjects such as gender, embodiment and the tension between public and private religion.