Survey For Assessing Bodies
Question #1: The “Burning of Paris” song from The Hunchback movie means something different now.
Right?
- I mean, think about it. We’re talking Notre Dame getting ashed into the pavement like a dead, grey cigarette, first its feet and then the spire, not the beloved spire, everyone said as if the plain parts of the building being incinerated was a little less sad.
- This means we’re talking people, who never remember to cry over lost things they can’t see.
- Relics are lost forever and always. Some sick love letter to cut your tongue on when licking it closed from the light of day.
- None of the above.
- All of the above.
Question #2: You know what you aren’t into?
- Vulnerability.
- Multiple choice questions.
- Looking through various photos of historical sights that don’t exist anymore.
- Pledging hours and endless guzzles of iced coffee and chardonnay to the non-existant gods of creating, of writing bad poetry and sometimes really good poetry, but mostly to the curiosity I can’t seem to satisfy.
- Other.
Question #3: What does a cathedral have to do with titles, or bodies, or with the dissection of everything that came before this?
- Well, somebody once told me that my body was a temple, which apparently meant it wasn’t supposed to hold silver nose-rings or detailed ink spilled from a talented stranger’s fingers. I have six tattoos now. Maybe if hoops were called halos, I could be considered holy.
- Old churches need renovation. Old churches hold bodies inside of their bodies.
- I think somebody is laying tile down in the interior of my stomach. On the plus side, at least I’m not on fire. Even if the world is.
- Churches are torched in Louisiana, Chile, France—during the opening hymns of service, we break the body and try to control ours, while also making it smaller, or rebuilding the frames that held us together in a common space before going up in flames, shaking a pointer finger and scolding holy hell.
- I do not wish to respond.
Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she is an MFA Candidate at Northern Michigan University and an Associate Editor for Passages North. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulane Review, Drunk Monkeys, Sidereal Magazine, and Coffin Bell, among others. She was selected for Mary Ruefle's Advanced Workshop at The Lighthouse Lit Fest in Denver, and was featured in River Styx's 2019 Hungry Young Poets Summer Reading Series. You can find her on twitter at @hannahcajandigt, or at www.hannahcajandigtaylor.com