Wonder Eye
by Christiana Drevets
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026
by Christiana Drevets
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026
"Red Gesture," J G Orudjev. Mixed media collage, ??x 3in., 202?
Wonder Eye
standing in a digital country,
i hold a spare-thread argument with a version of myself i despise.
i am no longer that girl who lives in the purple chamber.
everything happened once in the purple chamber.
until i stepped outside and waited for someone to walk by so i could scare them.
sometimes i know the mask is wrong and i take it up anyway.
it’s like if you imagine you are hard at work in a dark room,
developing photographs of the places you used to live in.
and while you are pinning the photographs to dry, you cannot tell how old they are.
even though you have the eerie feeling they are from your childhood.
you keep waiting to recognize one of the faces in the portraits.
but all the people in the photos are smiling in a stilted fashion,
and distantly as if they were hired.
our troubled faces in a photograph come out developed in a compromised light.
the dream has given them a strange texture.
a red texture.
a peculiar morphing.
with no way to limit the exposure as i’d like to.
in true form, my eyes crumple under the abrupt intake of color.
i spiral out of the asking.
i hold a spare-thread argument with a version of myself i despise.
i am no longer that girl who lives in the purple chamber.
everything happened once in the purple chamber.
until i stepped outside and waited for someone to walk by so i could scare them.
sometimes i know the mask is wrong and i take it up anyway.
it’s like if you imagine you are hard at work in a dark room,
developing photographs of the places you used to live in.
and while you are pinning the photographs to dry, you cannot tell how old they are.
even though you have the eerie feeling they are from your childhood.
you keep waiting to recognize one of the faces in the portraits.
but all the people in the photos are smiling in a stilted fashion,
and distantly as if they were hired.
our troubled faces in a photograph come out developed in a compromised light.
the dream has given them a strange texture.
a red texture.
a peculiar morphing.
with no way to limit the exposure as i’d like to.
in true form, my eyes crumple under the abrupt intake of color.
i spiral out of the asking.
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About the Author
Christiana Drevets is a poet living in Queens, New York. She is interested in writing about horror, dreams, and other mysteries. Her work can be found in Quarto Magazine, the Red Ogre Review, and on Poets.org. She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University About the Work
“Wonder Eye” is part of a series of poems each bearing the same title. This title was inspired by the 17th century visionary Jakob Boehme, who designed a map of the universe called “The Philosophical Sphere or the Wonder Eye of Eternity.” “Wonder Eye” as a series inhabits a quieter version of Boehme’s visionary mode, with a speaker who peers through the world with a similar schematic Eye on eternity, forwards and backwards; observing life as a series of masquerades and impartial images, where names and specific personalities are effaced, and masks and riotous colors emerge more prominently. In this particular piece, the first line’s “digital country,” situates the speaker specifically within the liminal space of the online, virtual world (where I, of course, discovered Boehme, and is also a chamber where “everything happened once”). In the buzzy unreality of the “digital country,” images appear with rapid, pixelated immediacy and are not revealed with the proper methodology one would use when developing film. The juxtaposition between these digital and analog elements felt like an access point to the uncanny. |
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About the Process
In general, my writing process involves speedy, low stakes drafting and then less speedy rolling experiments in revision and reordering. I am constantly reading and watching movies, so lots of my generative writing is informed by a story I have been immersed in. The immediate genesis of this poem occurred while I was watching Panos Cosmatos’ weird 2010 horror film “Beyond the Black Rainbow.” The plot of being in a photography room, clipping photos of unrecognizable but familiar people, was an actual dream I recorded months before I finished this poem. I recollected it because it fit the dreamy, muffled reality of the speaker, where the eye begins to distinguish a chillier background to an everyday habit or hobby, in which places are unbound from their regular gravity, and an interrogation of memory goes sideways or blank. |
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About the Artist
J G Orudjev (she/her) is a mixed media artist, collagist, and sculptor living and working outside of Washington DC. Her work explores the nature of memory, transformative and transitory states, and the act and language of making meaning. "Collage is uniquely suited to this path because it is fundamentally reflective of the ways we construct narrative from association--the strata of image and context that provide the basis for both our private archetypes, and our shared visual language." J G’s work has appeared in print both domestically and internationally, has been selected by jury to show in galleries throughout the United States, and is part of several private collections. She is a member of NOMA, a cooperative gallery, where she fulfills a roll as a member coordinator. She also works as an artistic and curatorial consultant to a regionally recognized framer and gallerist. Find her online at bio.link/jgorudjev |
