Elastic Anthology vol 1 is a collection of poetry, prose, photographs, messages, and illustrations from sex workers gathered in collaboration with Xue Shen. It is the first issue of a serial publication that aims to extend our contact with one another.
Whores speak in slant rhymes. The syntax of sex work takes many forms. It is at once direct, askew, total metonymy, embodied metaphor. Constructing a fantasy is labor: our bodies collude or rebel. We mystify and are mystified in every moment of refusal or capitulation, negotiating risk in any moment. Our work and our refusal of work throws the value of time, bodies, and exchange into crisis. The dominant grammar, as we know it, cannot account for these crises.
Our bodies bear them. We must work in many genres to register the crises we produce, and the crises we survive. It is in the heart of these crises we find each other. We articulate them often in jokes, often in tyrades, often in gossip, often in support circles, often across Blacklist platforms. We must document what we know, because otherwise what we know will be crushed: the intimate knowledge that law nor history can possibly confront.
Elastic Anthology bears this intimate knowledge. Our poems are psychedelic forms of journalism. Our manifestos come from the gut. When there are no words, we snap photos at the end of a shift, an hour, a night, an overnight. The mirror is often our closest comrade. If we are lucky, we are working with friends, who show up imprinted in our psyches. We remember in flashes: tattoos, thread counts, bruises, minutes passing. Magic isn’t anything other than being able to make something appear, that has been rigorously disappeared. Whores are the tear in the reality. The veil is thin. It is in our hands.
Contributions from Vanessa Carlisle, Mer Starr, Squiggles and Sluts, Evie Vigil, Aria Dove, Mata Flores, Aasir Cherot, Xue Shen, Skeleton Johnson, and Brandy-Alexander Weber.
OW 006 Risograph Printed by Empress Editions in Johnstown, PA January 2023
photographs featured in this post are by Skeleton Johnson