ZEO

Once a foreign body in my own life, I have decided to remodel

this mobile home of mine into suitability.

I am darning all the god-made holes in a contrasting colour.

Sometimes it feels like everyone is growing backwards.

I am tired of marrow-minded people

who bury their heads in the soil

to avoid new propagations

and how they stare at me

as if I am stood naked in a greenhouse

outrageously, like an installation artist

occupying their village turf.

There is a public ruckus about me.

Constantly, I must scrape out the opinions

that get stuck under my fingernails

and support from the audience feels adjacently awkward.

I am not enjoying the process of

shelling myself like edamame.

I thought it would feel like freedom

but it feels more like becoming easier to swallow.

‘Ongoing act of performance’

Church Service

Image ID: Two black and white photographs with white borders. The top image is a view of rooftops, treetops, and clouds from an open window or balcony. The bottom image is an overexposed photo. It seems to depict a bedroom with a paneled window. We can see cluttered furniture, an unmade bed, a vase of wilting flowers, and a frame containing a nondescript portrait. The two photographs have yellow italic text superimposed in the style of film subtitles. The text reads: “The uvulas of bells are swollen, loud. / I hear them undulating, far away: overwrought or overjoyed, I cannot say.”

 

Let thaumaturgic theatre begin:

my body is an artefact of sin.

And which sin would that be? Horrific configuration of the feminine, a defiling soil,

soiled by the fact of my birth. They don’t care whether I’m a rib or a side. Either way,

it’s a half to their whole. Something they own. I am the second make, made for his sake.

We were cleaved and rent apart at some point, and there is no chance of our

bones knitting together again.

See me, here, standing outside their church.

I am something of a mote, a moot point.

They deem me unworthy and unresolved – which is it? – and, apparently, he can do something

about that. He packages me neatly in 114, rolled up between the lines.

I can be smoked after dinner like tobacco. I can be shaped like proverbial clay in their hands, for

their purposes, but something tells me that I won’t see the light of the kiln.

Tired of this language of reinscription.

Tired of the in-between, both/and, neither/nor,

or never being what they want in ways that matter.

I find myself drawn to God like a moth to a lamp. Please, tell me what the kingdom of heaven is

like. I don’t trust them to describe it truthfully. I sought, sort between what is theirs

and what is God’s. But I cannot find where one ends and the other begins. And what

does it mean to be alike? Likeness is found in self-reference, I think. And I do not see myself in

the church. See me, here, living in a lukewarm body, ready to be moulded

into whichever sinner they want.

‘Self-portrait as Mary Magdalene’

Three poems read by ZEO

Image ID: A square image of a shirtless head and shoulders seen from the back is side lit from the right in red. The subject of the photo has close cut hair and no adornments. The background is a marbled grey. A rough circle of white has been sketched around the head.

ZEO is a multimedia artist based in Oxford and London. Their practice centres on self-portraits, poetry comics and family photographs salvaged from house clearances. ZEO’s work plays with scripture, dreamscapes and amplified internal monologues, exploring subjects such as gender, embodiment and the tension between public and private religion.