Nadia Rhook

Merkin Number 9

In response to a Merkin Art Exhibition, Castlemaine Fringe Festival, March 2025.

1.

Doiley on doiley, the pleasure

Of domestic come to rest in a

Creation point.

When is a heart a vagina? When is

A vagina hours and hours of

work? Be delicate, said the

hands. Come to a point.

Stitch a pearl to the cotton of

your flesh. Peg it to a

line. Fold the edges

Until your delicate aligns with

Mine. If the cotton resists,

Find the give of it. Remember. A

Pearl is not a prize or a

Production. It’s a memory.

Before we were domesticated, we were

ocean.

2.

When I said flesh earlier I wanted to

Tell you about what it requires.

Not the transparency and breakability

Of an individual doiley. Two or

Three layers.

Strength in numbers. Sure, we were

Made for beauty. But we re-made

Ourselves, to self-protect. Is the

Oyster on strike? Fuck earrings.

Necklace. A creature near

Another creature. Work upon work.

Stitch after wave after birth.

3.

Questions of consent

Haunt merkin and

Body both. When is

A trade an art? When

Is art a strategically placed

triangle of capital? When you

walk and creep and slide and

Disintegrate away. Fly. Is this

The long anticipated

Release? From here, you

Are silhouettes. Objects to

Be picked, admired, touched.

The window is a mirror

Never ceasing to reflect that

Which inhabits it. We can’t

Release you into movement while

You’re so busy releasing us. You’re tying

Our imaginations to history with

Strings we silently, easily, break.

Today, you broke my idea of

Clothing. And clean-dirty futures. In the future,

There will be fun. Feathers.

Ned. Crochet. Tassels. Tasmania.

Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Disco balls.

A case of dried-up soap with dead

Flies embedded. Washing machines. Sunshine.

Erica Weatherlake

The Mewstone

Terraqueous

After a day here and I began

to resist, a sun that would not

stop interfering. The first

72 hours were horses,

a half remembered gallop across

a hatching sea. Enter, dawn

shrugging in a weary sky.

The gurgles faint and fetal,

expiring on the shore.

April the first

Apart from the fagus

the shades of the woodland

drone on bromidic. But the light -

a light so white it splinters.

Fragments lodged in speech and sea

and how by sundown it nuzzles

a sort of creamed honey

pooled between rocks. Phoebus

pickled sedge and samphire.

By any metric,

the mileage of day unnatural.

Purposeful clearing of forested land

All atingle in the premature

warmth. Thickets became clearings,

sweat replaced dew. A parade

of scalps flush with

the halophytic herbland. Often

in the secret hours I’d test the milk,

too far gone to be white

a smear of yellow. I cooked

in all shades of loss.

Service

Into this placeless winter

the temperature seemed never

twice the same. Too saline

for frost, the night cluttered

with small movements. A womb

prone to daydreaming.

On Sundays I lay

facedown, the Mewstone

obscured by breath and foliage.

As if these nights were

interlocutory. A particular shade

of crimson threading

together the hard and the hushed.

Shari Lynelle

Self-Portrait as a Merkin

In the passive voice this

merry Merkin was made by

was done to

was born

materials include

wire lace face

feathers felt

one mouldy lemon

one meshed wasp’s nest

seven glass vials

eleven mounds of fake

fur fringe laugh

much work was worked up

worked over handmade

love handles

frottage scoured

not necessarily domestic

but cleaning one hell

of a preoccupation

try this waxed hand it to you

hung-in-the-sun

invitation not necessarily

static or polished

but spirit gum covered

eros a verb big wigged

strategic not lying

still life in motion