Myriam Tran - editorial "Meet Me in Paris" for Flair Germany, September 2024

Photographer: Jem Mitchell

graphite, acrylic, and coloured pencil on wood 50 x 40 x 1.9 cm

The Papyrus of Ani, 1400 B.C. Why do you return? What could they mean to you now— this flesh, these openings, these candles burning at each end of my body as if warmth and light could reach me? What is it you desire? What lack is there in Heaven? I always thought it would be terrible to be beyond change. Now we are both beyond change; there is nothing I can give you. You have returned to me in the form of a bird; your wings are large, they would enclose me. How tremulous and soft you are, your slow, feathery turnings of love, of desire. My arms are rigid at my sides. There is so much I do not want to remember. You remember everything, and cannot rest. Each transgression. Each lily slowly opening. How so many times you watched me move from innocence to bitterness, from bitterness to rage, and then forgiveness. It's strange how I had to forgive the earth for not loving me, each rock and tree, knowing all the while I did not matter, that the inanimate is beautiful because it cannot feel. Now I am inanimate. Your longing a flame that cannot wound me. Your wings embrace an emptiness like air.

by Louise Glück

I wanted to stay as I was still as the world is never still, not in midsummer but the moment before the first flower forms, the moment nothing is as yet past –

not midsummer, the intoxicant, but late spring, the grass not yet high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips beginning to open –

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others, the ones who go first, a tense cluster of limbs, alert to the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child’s fierce confidence of imminent power preparing to defeat these weaknesses, to succumb to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery