SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 96
SINE QUA NON
Matty Glasgow
domestic pastoral
“Barbed wire entered human history once its cost had been pushed right
down by two decades of agricultural development…Only then could
it become a key element in the modern texture of power, or of misery.
And the misery which humans inflict on animals may ultimately be
inseparable from the misery which they inflict on themselves.” —Reviel
Netz, “Barbed Wire”
Sometimes, I say domestic, and I mean home,
or the state of it—messy as the unmade bed,
pristine as any counter wiped clean. Likely,
in between. Often, when I say the word,
I mean the state and all the ways it displays
its violences but refuses to know them.
My beloved hangs art on the living room
wall, steady in his commitment to precision.
There are five clothed animals: a bison in
checkered flannel, a rabbit donning a floral
crown, a bear in sherpa-lined denim, a goat
with climbing rope, cams, and nuts, a hen
in overalls and a blue bandana. They look
to one another like who in god’s name dressed
us and get us out of these fucking frames.
A heart pulses, deveined like the shrimp he
prepares in the kitchen sink, detached from
its arteries, too. Roots unfurl into open palms,
to beg and to pray being the same act here.
I survey his labor, thus, time and all its spatial
ironies on the smooth white surface. Animal
aesthetics as they are. His name is a place
the state just bombed. Though we don’t require
this relation to be furious or frightened.
Once, when we were home, we sat in a river.
Now, the sandbar is covered in razor wire.
When a man says, the state of things, metal
just growing out of the ground like that, he does
not expect us to believe him. He means to
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