Dexter Barker-Glenn

First Water
01.16–02.28.2026
Room 2

At first we came barefoot, and the little shells cut up our feet. Ouch! The blood and sand mingled and became friends shy as schoolboys, finally kissing one another on the mouth. Two piles of ash, two very good things, burnt. Unusable materially but of great spiritual import, now and later. The ash mixes with the soil, and the crops are pretty good. Everyone upstairs is appeased, for now. We could have eaten those hundred heads of steer, but now we can eat this whole year. I watch it start snowing and wrap my feet.

Born at the beginning, I was never in any sort of rush. Watching everything harden into crystal, into glass. The new pressure of bipedal weight on the sand, the heat that makes it hard. Don’t worry about language. There’s no alphabet for cattle. And when did speech come? Before or because of the invention of curtains? Certain technologies revealed themselves sooner than others. I remember tasting copper before everyone else found veins of it in the rock face. Now, as I wait for my bus I see a man peel away stereo wire to get to its long interior copper hairs.

Across from the bus stop I see the world’s most brilliant poster, sunfaded now. A big diamond’s million faces of beauty. The paper must have some special bond. In order to glue the world together, we need the bones of animals. The paper, glue and wood pulp, the sunlight trapped in the paper diamond’s paper facets. Press the black hide of the cattle, press the ash. Press the foot to press the heart to press the temple. It’s under such pressure that we may create the hardest and most brilliant crystal. Press the blade into the unblemished and hale skin, through the epidermis, through the fat for the priestess, through muscle and gristle. The fresh bone may feel like the hardest thing in the world, but I can show you one thing harder.

Looking up at that poster I think, whoever in this cluttered world wants to make a real sacrifice? Is this why everything is so dire? And what of all the people dead and decayed in boxes in the earth, piles of ash with one shining diamond on the left hand? Imagine how they advertise a diamond, all energy born back unto itself. Before we could use precise violence to carve diamonds into faces, we valued them differently. I’ve known grubby fingers of doubt to poke the eyes of the real. I decide at the bus stop, cars and bicycles and electricity fluttering around me, that it is up to me to make some small sacrifice. All this energy, carelessly wasted. Waste is inevitable, why not direct it?

I sit there, waiting, reflecting, and then the bus comes and I board, born into the blue distance, blue sunlight scattering the atmosphere, diamonds glittering, people starving, babies laughing, waving and clapping their dear fat little hands.

— Hannah Berger

Photos : Document original