Trish Salah | PROCEDURES FOR TURNING

i.

If you like, you can begin with a choice: inside or outside?
Ask, what are you doing there? I think you’re in our bed… I guess
our bed is still warm. Are you? Other things follow, you.

Do you have an apartment in mind? How do you enter? It comes from within,
from within.
Do you know, do you agree? To use your body as compressed energy
and vice versa.

Can you run, fly and spin at night?
Wait—so many shades to your skin life!

ii.

All those times in the mirror, the echo of fear coming through the window,
a different night sky. All the night sky is coming home, soon
soon. Look across the wall. Across the rooftop.

Are you going to go to the box wall and will you tie us to the box?
They tell you, the idea is to use things as body energy. Suppose
instead of the night we lay down in the grass.

Let me put your hand softly where I can see.
What contract is this? What soft gift of sea?

iii.

Staying with your lover makes you late for your date with the woman
you’ve been dreaming of. She waits for you to arrive, then leaves.
Which was your wish?

The day has passed, your body is hot, you are a different girl. There is
a picture of your friend’s farm, the weather is different, older
than you. (Listen to that, is it in your head?) Tomorrow.

Does it come then from the sea?
Some say it comes from the sea.

iv.

After some investigation, you learn: as characters’ minds are grounded
in reality, their bodies are a source of energy. Such a basic concept.
You need to take an aerial view for big results.

There are big and beautiful ideas that create a hero in your dreams and
a dream idea in your mind. They said, “what kind of attitude prevents
him from thinking about this toy?”

Controlled by outside forces
wanting the art of memory.

v.

When she imagines a house or a place in her mind, it is also called
a visual memory. It is also called the ability to see, so she said:
“Think about it as home. It’s research.”

Looking for devices that store human memory that can be redesigned.
Were you online, when it came out? Another idea is the “hole,” where
you can’t stand in the “hole” and look at the “walls.”

He knew his memory had gone wrong.
Blown on breeze gone wrong at night.

vi.

Remember that you woke up in this situation: “caves”
are places where people can build caves.
The important thing is to use it as physical strength. What?
Can it walk through chest walls?

When did it first occur? The scroll says, if you die in the “x,” you die
in real life. Did I say something here? What will you do when she’s not
there? Also, why should we create?

Enough to say, “A hand appeared.”
And you, you are not dead.


Trish Salah lives and writes in T’karonto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, in traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. She is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She has writing in recent issues of Mizna, Room Magazine, Teflon, Traffic Report and Tripwire, and in the edited collections, Arab Divas, Meanwhile Elsewhere, and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and is co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on cultural production, and of Arc Poetry Magazine, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit and non-binary writers.