When we were at the ear doctor last December and he squeezed that silicone swirl into your ears, the end- the part we could see- looked like a rose. I liked this, the thought of you having shoved a rose in each ear. What a statement, so sensual; it reminded me of the dream you had when we first started dating. You had your earplugs in to sleep and I wanted to talk to you, so I pulled them out, and when I did they were cherries.
A couple of months after the ear doctor, the rose bush outside the bedroom window- my favorite window in the house- bloomed in the same pink as those silicone roses. If I took a hot shower, the window would fog over and the roses would almost disappear, just pink blurs. Slowly, as I went about my morning and the fog dissipated, they came into clarity and it was time to leave.
When I leave the house, I hear the outside noises with the same lucidity and volume as when I was inside. We have these jalousie windows- glass slats that don't seal- so the outside is always coming in, always playing as soundtrack despite our best efforts to keep it out. That's why you wear earplugs to bed every night. You've given up on the house, and so the next step inwards in the concentric circles of liminality is you, your orifices.
We have the asshole, the pussy, the mouth, the nostrils, and the ears. What I like about the ears is that, unlike the mouth- which eats the cherry and says too much- they don’t externalize but only internalize and receive. When the ear doctor made silicone molds of your ears, they took on a shape that reminded me of a pair of chickens. California passed that proposition a few years back where egg-laying hens had to be given at least one square-foot of floor space per hen, and by 2020, we were fully cage-free.
I was born in the Year of the Rooster.
-Bailey Connolly, 2024
Bailey Connolly (b. 1993) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2023 and BA from Bard College in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Tops and Bottoms, Iowa (New York); Chicago, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha); Mickey, Mickey (Chicago); this sentence no sentence, YveYANG (New York); Held, Yale University (New Haven); Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire, Scherben (Berlin) and Dresses Without Women, Mickey (Chicago).
