"videotape" list poem

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 Henry: 

did you know they 

make dummies with tear ducts now?


1. In 1999, the Chinese author Liu Cixin published the science fiction short story “With Her Eyes,” where the male protagonist uses sensor technology to transfer his experience at the surface of the Earth underwater—to the eyes of a female researcher trapped in a deep-sea exploration vehicle at the center of the Earth. I don’t want to be closed in. The unnamed male protagonist remembers her saying. She names the flowers in the prairie. Her voice swelled with rapture. 2. Iris (Merriam-Webster): the colored muscular diaphragm at the front of the eye, which controls light intake; genus of sword-leafed flowers; Greek goddess of the rainbow. 3. I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. (Neale-Hurston) 4. They learn to see things twice. Don DeLillo, on the unnamed girl of “Videotape” whose eyes through which we see the murder. 5. Seeing Les Mis in the school theater made me feel hollow. 6. In 1955, hikers unearthed movie reels that had been buried by the mountain-base town, polyester film sticking like skin to the snow, projecting their scenes onto the glacier ice. 7. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. (Walker) 8. You know there’s a kind of purple flower called “cosmos”? 9. To love another person 

is to see the face of God. (Hugo) 10. Rob swore it was an anthology.

11. The last words of Liu Cixin’s unnamed female protagonist: “I can still see every one of the flowers that I named.” 12. The proverbial bag: to be bruised in the rainbow, to see everything in everything else; excavated to less than skin, the face of God; 13. Mary Oliver: Blue Iris. “And my heart panics not to be,

As I long to be, the empty,

waiting, pure,

speechless receptacle.”


receptacle: one that receives and contains something.

Comments

  1. Vighnesh ChandaApril 26, 2026 at 12:55 PM

    This was a very EYE-OPENING post Ivy. Good blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elina S.April 26, 2026 at 5:57 PM

    IVYYY i can’t even tell what’s going on in this piece but i love how chaotic it feels😭 the formatting feels really random but also intentional—i’d be interested in rhetorically analyzing this??? keep cooking bangers i see uuuuu

    ReplyDelete

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