New Poem: Dress

I was watching a channel that I didn’t know existed

and a man was explaining that they had been doing

visual research on street clothes and they had picked

up on the meme of the ragged dress. The ragged

dress, he said, spoke as much of absence as presence

and that modernity asks us to represent the binary.

There were some stills of people sleeping rough and

some moving footage of refugees resting. The man

pointed at the clothes and said that there were gaps,

‘aporia’ through which we see the body. The body he

explained is never ‘innocent’ but is always constructed

in time and space and whether we inflict damage on it,

or enclose it, or restrict its movements or eroticize it,

these are choices. The man then opened another file

and showed the designs he had made for “The Ragged

Dress”. I was watching a channel that I didn't know

existed.