I am an endgame, I was told. And now, I have my lengthy blackish, more brown, hair – that still shimmers in the rare light of the sun – gathered together with a chili pepper clip. Red, the shape oblong, has many prongs to keep all the many strands of hair in a straight cluster. This can only work well because of the tension in the metal spring. Near me, over a soft open flame, is a cast iron stock pot, with a faded glaze of gradient yellows. Below the lid, under pressure, is parboiled rice from a readymade box of jambalaya. Often times, exploring food markets is a calming, informative experience that I seek out, nor do I mind as a chore. All of a sudden, earlier, as I was hunched over my coat in the pasta aisle, I was crouched down, confronted with jars of pureed salsa, chunky salsa, and other ingredients that do not seem to belong in salsa. I was about to faint, and I was trying strongly not to lose the energy that I would require to move my body along the returning path. There, in my breaths, too, was the possibility of a panic attack, which feels too common for comfort. I needed my body to become parallel with the ground, as I often do, but this adjustment was too unconventional to achieve. There, on the display shelf, a box with a familiar name, called out my name. Uneagerly, one box of many was now in the basket. I like looking for Southern touchstones. In stores, this is a glass bottle of Tabasco [hot sauce] and the shiny, crinkle of Zapp’s [kettle potato chips]. Soon, my mother is arriving in Chicago, to visit for several days, and I am reminded of the day I walked to the post office to send a package, destined for Louisiana. Across the road from the corner office, where juniper cascades, diagonally, is another market that I had not yet explored. Nearly each day, in the persistent wraths of anxiety, coaxing my self to move beyond an arm’s distance is unsettling, but in that moment, I was already outside and all that was necessary of me to do was cross from one side to the other, and there I could walk through the hinged glass door, the entrance to a new land. The closest some individuals can come to visiting another country, another culture – is through the products and people at markets. The Asiatic allure of greens - bok choy, tatsoi, runner beans, enoki, lotus – holds me there for more than one hour. My departing bag held Thai basil, Chinese chives, soon tofu, and vegan shrimp formed of konjac. These frozen shrimps could have been added to the boiling water, steaming the jambalaya. Rather, I quickly added fresh chopped celery and a hearty tomato, in addition to salt. Not that this meal had a recipe, nor do I now cook from recipes, however, when a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of a powder, say, garlic or cinnamon, I read this as 3 tablespoons. This is to say, I added spices to the pre-seasoned meal. Although the colour matched the swatch in my memory, the taste was more of a Tex-Mex rice. There to distract me all the while was the Silver Jews, mixed intermittently with instrumentals throughout a digitally generated playlist. David Berman’s voice, the voice, now, of an angel, is never separate from another voice I can no longer hear. Silence is... 

I met Tennessee Williams in eight plays, at the Jennings Carnegie Library, a week after leaving Tennessee. My home in Lake Charles, and the entire city, was without electricity or water supply and the house was unlivable. I was in a used book store in Knoxville, when I received images of the city, of my childhood home, of my garden. The first night, I slept on the concrete driveway, where I first rode a bicycle, inside a burnt orange tent, with my truest friend, Clover, a chummy chocolate Labrador. The twist within the winds of Hurricane Laura uprooted eight or more trees on the land; Sycamore, Pecan, parallel, dead. The honeybee hives were intact, still secure, always secure. Once above, now aside was the swamp tree, uniquely both, coniferous and deciduous, a Bald Cypress. I was with a chronic depression, a death drive, when I was sitting on the dry rotted, wooded bench below a shaded structure. At the center of my sweaty neck, I was stung by a wasp and the meaning haunts me, for I do not know how I am touched by such invasive luck. Green has returned to the remaining branches on the Cypress, as have the many swarms of bees, when the air is hot – the air is always hot – and steamy, almost tropical, without the relief of any crystal clear water. But there is always the melting honey, below the Bald Cypress.

Textile Resource Center. 2023, Room 1003, Sharp Building, 37 S Wabash Ave, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL

Abakanowicz, M. (1982). Magdalena Abakanowicz: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (first). Abbeville.

eFlex MM-840 Digital Microscope 75x / 300x

Louisiana Bald Cypress tree bark

Corn husk

Mariano’s. 2023, 5201 N Sheridan Rd, Chicago, IL

Park to Shop Supermarket. 2023, Sun Plaza, 4879 N Broadway, Chicago, IL

United States Postal Service. 2023, 4850 N Broadway, Chicago, IL

McCormick & Company, Inc. [2022]. Zatarain’s Jambalaya Rice Mix. New Orleans, La.

Image 1

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL132020_Laura.pdf

Last KLCH WSR-88D radar reflectivity image of Hurricane Laura at 0554 UTC 27 August 2020 before

the radar was destroyed. Image courtesy of NWS Lake Charles WFO.

Image 2

https://www.weather.gov/lch/2020Laura

Above: GOES 16 GeoColor Satellite Image of Hurricane Laura at 2301 UTC (6:01 PM CDT) on August

26, 2020.

Image 3,4

Bald Cypress tree bark cordage; hand-made

Image 5,11

Microscopic Bald Cypress tree bark

Image 6

Bald Cypress tree bark, dry | soaked

Image 7-10

Microscopic Bald Cypress tree bark; cordage

Image 12

The rope is to me like a petrified organism, like a muscle devoid of activity. Moving it, changing its position and arrangement, touching it, I can learn its secrets and the multitude of its meanings. I create forms out of it. I divide space with it. Rope is to me the condensation of the problem of thread, the thread composed of many fibers whose number nobody tries to establish. Transported from one place to another it grows old. It carries its own story within itself, it contributes this to its surroundings. I used it in urban landscapes where it became an echo of the banished organic world. It enabled one to see architecture with all its artificiality of hard decorative shell. I sense its strength which it carried by all intertwined elements, such as those in a tree, human hand, or a bird’s wing – all built of countless cooperating parts. Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1975

Image 13-17

Microscopic Bald Cypress tree bark cordage, hand-made; Z twist, S ply

Image 18-19

Microscopic Bald Cypress tree bark; pixilation

Image 20

Corn husk, soaked

Image 21-23

Corn husk cordage; S twist, Z ply

Image 24

Honeybee swarms in said Bald Cypress tree branches, 2023, 30°08’28”N 93°15’26”W

For physical reference of Bald Cypress tree bark and corn husk cordages – see TRC

For a cross-reference of Louisiana Bald Cypress tree, see thesis submission of Chelsea Dronett in

repository via Flaxman Library

Image detail – Agora, Grant Park 1135 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL

Chelsea Dronett, MA Visual–Critical Studies 2023