Fabrication by Jennifer Brown
Fabrication by Jennifer Brown Text and textile, so easy to hear in English their kinship. Words and fabric, which comes from a root meaning “making” — both text and textile are fabrics I make for myself, drape myself in, I swaddle myself in sometimes for safety, speech and cloth to keep the cold off, insulation. I arrange them around me, about me. Around, about: they’re literal and figurative at once, my favorite kind of fabric, the Emperor’s robes sewn entirely out of story and fear of exposure, exactly as visible as the viewer believes. Like fairies, gods, mirages. Like phantom limbs. Like traces of bright light in the closed eye. The tickle of a thread hanging from an inside seam of a shirt or the loose hair that brushes the neck until it falls away. Loose ends, I think, will connect to something if I follow their loops and pick at their knots until the thread slips free, falls undone into my hands. Then what? I work hard to make the ends fast, knitting, weaving. An imitation of the body’s ropy vascular interior, the life-sustaining endlessness of its closed circuits. I know I can’t wear words outside in the snow for warmth. But I know I can’t be anywhere, can’t be anyone, without my loom, my warp and weft, my bright needle. I try to put them down, and in the threaded electric folds, inside the bone-case where I’ve somehow stitched an image of myself, my ears hear my voice say “put them down.” Says, “be quiet,” my voice-inside. Says, “shhh.” It hums. It makes a sound like breath but with meaning. It talks me through the silence. I say “it,” but I mean I.
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Jennifer Brown (she/her) lives with her partner and a funny-looking dog in Montpelier, VT, having recently left the too-hot south behind for good. She has taught creative writing and literature in high schools, colleges, summer programs, and festivals and has held residencies at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Orison Anthology, Cimarron Review, Zone 3, Twyckenham Notes, and Cinncinnati Review. Her first poetry collection, Natural Violence, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2022.
