Wear Your Heart on Your Arm

photo of painting by Saskia Leek

I have a summer dress I never wore so started wearing it inside out and received a lot of compliments. Great dress! Nice dress!

 

Its silk chiffon lining a deeper pink than its 100% silk paler melon outer. A Karen Walker I bought in an end of end of last summer season archive sale for one-50 instead of seven-50.

 

I really was getting a bargain even if it is a size too big. Our model Carla’s five nine, she’s wearing a size eight. Despite the extra size it still snatches my biceps when driving.

 

The design is one of those ill-fitting drooped shoulders oversized lost waist voluminous skirt dresses. A dress with attitude and long ties prone to dragging theatrically in the mud. 

 

Multi-coloured covered button detail and industrial KW arrow zipper. A pink sack in the best silkworm-made materials - it looked killer on Carla in model’s own black biker boots.

 

Chains and sass. All The Single Ladies. Yet more English bather’s modesty curtain on five foot four in sandshoes me – a lined but badly hung curtain. 

 

But here I am wearing my dignity on my sleeve. My heart on my arm. My insides could be out the fabric is the colour of raw flesh - those meat packets I study at the supermarket.

 

Then end up at the self-checkout with a heavy load and nothing for dinner because it all starts to look imitation colour dyed forever raw and un-cookable in plastic petri dishes.

 

Kiwi poet, Jordan Hamel wrote a poem about eating an elephant. A poem about giving a lecture about how to eat the metaphorical elephant in the room with bacon references.

 

My country cat left a partially eaten rabbit on the balcony outside my bedroom. He does this frequently. Often only heads are missing. A torn ear discarded. Brains must taste sweet. 

 

This reminded me of all the lambs’ brains my mum made my sister and I eat in order to make us grow up brainy - when she wasn’t cooking up sheep offal to fuel us with iron.

 

Popeye could keep his canned spinach we had fried liver. Once country cat left a Victorian medical experiment in rabbit – the skin and fur completely removed from one side.

 

A precision dissection exposing muscle and sinew, rib bones, intestine, vital organs, and small non beating heart. De-gloved rabbit in aspic with spleen.

 

A woman coming up the escalator at Auckland airport told her friend - Yeah, but you can always smile and say hello. Wear your heart on your arm.

 

You never save money in a sale. That’s the truth of it.

Jane Bloomfield 

Collection 2023/24