Chris Merrill asked the LOD participants last week to write for 20 minutes using the following words: silk, carriage, and window. Here's what I wrote:
Burking*
the silken-haired, porcelain-
skinned subjects of anatomical
examination, not the victims of
hit-and-run drive-buys
by carriage just prey to
death by alcohol-enhanced
suffocation and "burk"
method, blackmarket trading of bodies
to surgical students
birth a window into
reproductive imagination
*a method of murdering victims without scarring or damaging the body so that the corpse could be sold for surgical dissection and educative purposes; female specimens were particularly prized
(I had just finished reading a book on human remains and Joel Peter-Witkin's photographs have been too fresh in my mind from work.)
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