Ava's Substack

The dying of an eye

ART IS — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:16:19 GMT

Tell me about the death of salt

about mines

ripe burgundy

about the itch

that wounds my face

about a cat

mottled green

about a whale grave

under a whale sky

about the flame

of sprawling arteries

about snow

roaring cloudless

about the silence

of a hyena night

about wrinkles

that tear the folds of waves

about the surgery

of a chronic heart

about the rain

of a dusty snotty road

about the cradle of blue where the dying of an eye is like a sandstorm.

Tulips on page 108

ART IS — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:15:56 GMT

I sit on the chair unsteadily

my vines grow into the load-bearing walls

groundlessly

my speech rustles like water in a tap

ceaselessly

dripping with color

a valley of fuel

if one finds blood in the milk

splatters of tulips

a glow on the edge of white

a hoarse canvas

stains of a cough

a collection of blue on page 108

and your fingerprints

like coal in a mine

i refuel my lungs with gasoline while i rock on the chair

or roam the perimeter of (de)fall

a frozen magnolia at the foot of the light

a sail awaiting the wind

a word that has forgotten the mouth

if you close your vision you can see the stars decay

while

tulips

reproduce Holland

page 108.

Ruby flowers

ART IS — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:40:14 GMT

Ruby flowers grow on fingers

rusty ~~gray~~ marbled-

fragmentarity of the axis

leaden and

a crumbling green dawn

electric as

a bullet

oily and

burning

a thick pink day

like cotton candy-

unstable vibrating

pinkness

like youth

transparent and

astounded

ruby flowers grow on fingers

like poetry swells on vocal cords

deaf and

bound in

the amber chthon

of cherry

haze and

everywhere

ruby

flowers

coral

cuts.

Purple bees

ART IS — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:41:26 GMT

Sultry peaches

seized by purp

le bees

with tangerine backs and paws

pineapple grass advances and retreats

like an ocean

seized by

presence

foaming over apricot dust

stupe

fied packed tight

like the eye of a frightened blue

starchy hand of gray sand-

tomb of silvery molecules

chestnut strawberry

like blood

from purple taut veins

of an emancipated unventi

lated night

hoarfrost rustles like a quiet dragonfly

until scarlet smears the horizon

with pure feeling.

Kerosene story

ART IS — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:15:19 GMT

We were in our final year. Studying something. Studying surfaces. Studying lust. Studying how to fuck. You loved philosophy only to turn it against our marriage 10 years later. I was a lousy student. So lousy that I was supposed to drop out next semester. My rebellion that turned into weeping. It was agony. Like I drowned but stayed alive. Before that day we knew each other but it was a tangential acquaintance. It did not pass through us. To the same extent we might as well not have known each other. Our class of intellectual upstarts and snobs was invited to an imbecilic conference or exhibition where we were supposed to commune with ~~high~~ fucking art. Imbeciles… that is who we really were. I looked at everything through the prism of disgust. Nausea is what I felt all that day while the guest professor (or whoever he was) read in his gray hoarse voice a lecture about (?) I don’t even remember what he lectured about I only remember his smoke stained voice which was hard as straw. I wanted to shrink and smolder smolder smolder. For many years after I imagined burning that place down and watching my past burn. Piercingly loud and terrifying. That evening I went straight to my room in that bastard motel where we stayed. Its walls resembled the bark of an old tree and the paint looked like the heels of my ancient grandmother yellowed and cracked. Rings of time. It seemed to reflect my destruction. Those walls screamed the way I never could scream. I stood under the shower for a long time flowing into the drain. I spread like oil on water the same black viscous slime. My body burned under the jets like a fuel tank. I was molting shedding skin humming and vibrating turning into one continuous pulsing spasm. I breathed and contracted breathed and contracted breathed and contracted until I was soaked through. There was steam everywhere as if I had drowned in a geyser. Or I was the geyser. Fingers like cold glass closed the tap. I stared at my naked cold reflection in the mirror and watched-watched-watched until the eye sockets burst leaning my forehead against the spewing surface rough under my fingers the pattern of which fell apart and crunched like dry leaves. Next morning I woke up from something persistent and itchy fumbling with my limbs across the soft horizontality wrapped in a milky cocoon. Someone was silently senselessly pounding on the door. The body trying to break through the slumber headed along the shabby plaster to the twitching handle like my nervous tick in this god forsaken motel scary as my unshaven cunt. I flung open the wooden rectangle finding myself spat out beyond the stunned pain.

Lips opposite were saying something.

My swelling words in the throat.

My ear canals stuffed with cottoncottoncotton. Surrounded by the thickness of water.

My eyes like breadcrumbs shifted into the bottom of the eyes opposite. Bullet. R-E-C-O-G-N-I-T-I-O-N. The curator of our course her body like a tight string stood on the threshold of my decaying dream looking at me with THAT look. Ticker tape: DISAPPOINTMENT. I stood a thrown out fish from water suspended between stimulus and action. I remembered that I was supposed to give her papers about me being a child of god. Tight String reached out her callous hand hinting at why she was here. You said: one second break baggage in search of a thin folder of papers that iteratively wandered from hand to hand in the form of copies scan xerox. You for some reason thought at that moment: xerox like kerosene the same word. Kerosene that identifies or undermines you. You put the folder into the outstretched hand no preludes no postludes and she dissolved into the baggage of the other woman as a part of herself. Kerosene that depersonalized you scalping your identity.

Yellow (lemon) text

ART IS — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:47:13 GMT

Yellow lemon

yellow to the very core

how in this case

color

defines

taste

yellow yellow yellow

sour sour sour

yellowness creeps outward

t h r o u g h

white veins-fibers

juice yellow

l i k e

the lemon’s zest

rough

porous

yellow

shape (ri)pened yellow oval

product

f o r

yellow geometry

why is the lemon tree not yellow if its fruit is yellow

l i k e

paint on the yellow canvases

of van go-gh

yellow artists

klimt

klee

van gogh

yel-low investigation

of a yellow lemon

a yellow (ve)ssel

under

a yellow sky

the yellow tips of sour fingers

l i k e

the sour puss-face

of a yellow

lemon

sommelier.