Daniel BORZUTZKY
From The Book of Interfering Bodies
The Book of Prayers
To Whom it May Concern: Let us annihilate our bodies, says the first body in the Book of Prayers. Standing in a corner that is drawn onto a page of the Book, the body looks down at the other books and prays that the other bodies will die as the pages turn. The next page contains a body inside of a television screen. Veiled with hair, wrinkles, filth, and slobber, the body prays that the first blow it receives will be the last. Let my suffering end as it begins, the body says, and the screen shifts to an image of the body’s skin. The camera climbs up a pole where the nation’s flag is laminated in the skin of those who live on the pages and in the screens and in the dead valleys and ghost towns that dot the remains of the land. And let us pray for the nameless corpses, says the body on the cover of the Book of Prayers. The corpses are everyone and they are alone and alive in the grass and the sand and the forests and in our nostalgia for graves and tombstones and flowers that mark the memory of those bodies that once had names. And let us pray for the nameless corpses but let us not name them, says a body on a page of mutilated trees. The body looks out at a page of crawling and fluttering bodies that gyrate in the dead bushes of the dead fields near the books that mark those who have lost their names. A strange race of flies fills the page. They swarm and gurgle and suck the life out of everything and they live on the nameless bodies and they are the subject of the prayer uttered by a body on a page of fly infested bodies. When the flies suck our blood, says the prayer, when the flies suck off our skin and blood and when our bones and hair fall out, let our bones and hair form towers up which our bodies will climb out of this book and into the book of eternal ice. And the bodies ask the readers to pray with them. And the bodies tell the readers that by simply turning the pages they will be uttering the prayers for the dead. And the pages turn and there are bodies and murmurs emanate from them and we hear the prayer for those who died of hunger, for those who rotted away, for those who were eaten by dogs and vultures, for those whose faces were obliterated, for those whose eyes were removed from their skulls, for those who see and for those who refuse to see. For those who fell out of air planes and for those who were thrown into the sea. For those who were buried in the desert and for those whose disembodied legs floated down rivers and were found by children playing on the muddy banks. And the pages flip and there are bodies praying atop barbed-wire fences for the years to pass quickly, for the forests to belch up the nameless bodies, for the elevation of the bodies stuck in mud, for the journeys to be short, for the prayers to be silent, for the faces to have names, for the eyes to be blank, for the mouths to have teeth, for the teeth to chew, for the food to give warmth, for the warmth to give blood, for the blood to give life, for the life to give more life—to the people and the grass and the air that are dead.
The Book of Voices
The Book of Voices begins where the Book of Prayer ends. The voices emanate from the mud which the bodies have turned into. The bodies that have turned into mud speak all at the same time but not in unison. Body ABC speaks of the last blow; body DEF speaks of the first blow; body GHI speaks of the blows he was forced to give to body JKL; and body JKL speaks of the moment of silence between blows, the moment of anticipation, relief, anxiety, fear, horror, and ecstasy that comes in the pauses between blows. Body MNO speaks of the clouds and the breeze that she fell through; body PQR speaks of how soft and wet the mud is; body STU speaks of the daggers, the blades, and all the instruments they jammed into the bottom of his toes; body VWX speaks of the bottom of the sea, the fish and the algae and all the dead animals she saw as she sunk deeper and deeper into the dead water. Body YZ speaks of the dogs that ate his leg. The bodies speak all at once, and to hear them is to listen to an opera of voices that are muffled by mud. They speak of their loves, true, but the loves they speak of are now chained to rocks, tied to animals, electrocuted, or buried in different puddles of mud. The priests who could save the bodies from this purgatory have lost all interest in God. The priests gather dead flowers and throw them on the graves of those who have names and in so doing they try to recall those who lost their names. The priests scribble in their books that solitude is now their god, and that the dead rivers and mountains and forests and deserts will come back to life when everyone here is alone. The priests pray to the flashes of electricity they see when the skin of the bodies is singed. The priests pray to the traces of gun powder that are left on the hands of the men ordered to obliterate the other men. The priests do not eat. Hunger is their god and in their hunger they pray for all those creatures for whom the church does not allow them to pray. The priests pray as if they are in foreign countries whose languages they cannot speak. The priests think there must be some relationship between their prayers and the secrets of the world, but they are wrong. There is no relationship between their prayers and anything living or dead. Their prayers benefit no one: not the ones who pray and not the ones who are prayed for; not the silence and not the voices. The prayers flee reality just as the voices flee reality. The prayers speak of light and water and death but no one is there to hear them. The voices of the bodies meld into the prayers and together they gather as shapeless formations on the horizon and they are like countries with no continent, like continents with no world, like worlds with no universe. The reader finds these formations in the Books; she finds them in the air between pages and in the spaces between punctuation marks and letters. The reader hears the prayers as she reads and in the prayers she hears an absence of breath, an absence of death, an absence of reason. The reader hears the prayers and in them she hears all that her body has tried not to be. One doesn’t get used to this with time.