fish calendar1
By Anna Nygren
Fish Year
Fish Shell
Fish Hair
the Fishes are R/r/aw.
away
1 biography of the poem :
I was at my childhood house I was in the attic it was christmas I was alone & I felt a falling thing like a star or a sign or a world it was Everything & I could not stop writing when the poem came through me.
in childhood my sibling wrote to me :
hoppas du blir fisk
I wrote to someone :
words are vulnerable enchantments of worlds.
in childhood my life was like :
I could not eat or speak because of heart ache because of world hurt : I love the world therefore I am afraid of it.
I was told the Name of my Language was swedish but I think it is Words and sometimes it is Poem.
I wrote to someone :
Autistic people have six senses: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight, and then words. Words are a sense that cannot be compared to other senses but allows them to leak in. Words have taste and smell, they are tactile, scratch the skin, bulge in the kidneys, they look: the shape of the letters in different writing styles, they have sounds, sounds when they sound inside the brain and when they say themselves, they are a movement a dance. But all these qualities still cannot define the words. For the words are their own. Their own mind.
I found : Other.
I changed my name: Anna N (well it’s the same as I was called before, same is different!) became AnnaN – “annan” in swedish means “other”, the hidden thing inside me that i don’t know. the words are not human. the autistic has a problem with human, never being fully… being Other, yes yes.
I remember my sibling writing : HOPPAS DU BLIR FISK (the words are written by the hands, material, material) in swedish it means: I HOPE YOU’LL BECOME FISH. I was told it is a spelling mistake, it was supposed to say bli frisk = get well, but the R disappeared, and “frisk” (healthy, sound, well) became “fisk” (fish).
I wish I was a fish. To be fish. Not human. (The Fish: the Signs, the Secret, Hidden) I live with the miss-spellings: I work with Spells, the magic spells and rituals of witches, the magic, dark and blooming. The spelling of wor(l)ds finding hidden things in miss-takes (take care, take it and…).
This word, this world.
& I decided to be: FISH...
// I read Elsbeth Probyn’s text Eating the Ocean, they write:
In their articulation of what they call “a wet ontology,” Kimberly Peters and Phillip Steinberg ask, “How can one write about so ‘slippery’ a subject[,] . . . how can one write about the ocean as something to think not only with but from without reducing it to a metaphor?” (2015). Fish for me are not, and cannot be, metaphorical. Fish are the very principle of relatedness that holds this book together. But they are, after all, often below the surface. This is why I insist on an embodied and dialogic ethnography that is attuned to listening to stories and relaying them, to trying to capture affective spaces through various forms of description, and to reaching for the depth of history that informs tacit knowledge embodied in individuals’ ways of being and ways of recounting. //
I read : they write about, lesbian horses and a belonging that is a longing, and desire as method and I FEEL A LOT.
with this : the poem comes through me
Anna Nygren (they) is a writer and artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Artwork Source: “Fish Series, No.6,” Charles Demuth. From the Public Domain.
The Turning Leaf Journal 