Coates
Photograph, 2024
“I am a little pain weasel. I burrow into sweat-caked covers when facets clench nerves. I rest stressfully. Under duress. When migraines brain me into thoughtlessness for days, I become the pillow, the mattress. Skin sheet puddles. I wave in slight glass-cracked breezes as the curtains lidding the windows that hide the glare of the world from me. Or hide me from the world. When I’m not in pain, I scrounge around northeastern swamps. In nerve-dampened reprieves, I ferret from my pain hole. Awkwardly, but greedy. Gleeful. I catch up on work left chronically hanging, my sad little claws clicking on the computer at double speed as if that will make up for the days spent in bed. I visit beavers at the Poor Lawrence Swamp and find fun bugs to call my friends and dream of an existence outside of capitalism. This is true rest. The days I am in pain or am sick, when I become the cotton weave that holds me, I spend staring out of windows in the dark or from my bed with sunglasses on because everything is too bright. Light finds the hollow of the back of my skull where new pain lies sleeping and wakes and makes itself known. It has sharp nails and chalkboard screeches and a high, giddy cackle. I spend these days wishing pain away as if wishes were real. I slip into fantasy. I dream of becoming a beaver.”
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Coates is a writer and artist based in western Massachusetts working in between photography, installation, long-form hybrid fiction, and poetry. They teach art and writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and have been published, exhibited, or have work forthcoming in The New River, 3:AM Magazine, The Iowa Review, Hawai’i Review, Quarter Press, Moonstone Press, CICA, Marzee Gallery, 555 Gallery, among others.