Purpura

I was immediately drawn to the honest and poetic language in this piece. Purpura forces her readers to confront the reality she is facing in a realistic sense. She doesn’t try to shield her readers from the Gritty reality of what she saw and felt. She allows you to see what it is really like to draw back the veil of our idealized versions of death. We get to see through her eyes what is left when we are gone, and are forced to contemplate the bitter and scary reality of how frail what we hold now really is. 

At the same time she does this in a way that makes this harsh reality seem beautiful and detached; perhaps because she herself felt detached from the moment. Finding humor in the reality that we do not die in an angelic pose, but “birdlike, jutting, ridged.”  And ultimately realizing that not only is the body beautiful outside but inside as well. She describes the experiences of seeing the body opened and exposed as “familiar…like a dialect spoken only in childhood.” She relates this opening of the body to childbirth and how the body is able to “open beyond itself.” There is a point where it almost seems as if she is equating the removal of a child from the body to that of organs after death. “The mass of organs held in the arms, a cornucopia of dripping fruits hoisted to the hanging scale.” In essence equating the beauty of death to the beauty of birth. Both gory and both beautiful. Purpua asks her readers to go where they are uncomfortable. To think about things in a way that is easy to shy from.

Toward the end she draws it all into a place we are all familiar with… a grocery store. She begins to connect the experience before to the reality of our own frailty, and how carelessly we walk around as if we are indestructible. She compares human organs to the fruit and produce waiting to be eaten. Then in the end notices a film covering the world. A film that is equivalent to that of our inner bodies “ pearly, lush and arterial.”   I was both drawn and repelled by the story. I was enamored by her style and found myself admiring her way of seeing things.  I loved how she took something we as humans tend to find repulsing and showed us that there is beauty and message even in the least expected or most feared places of the human psyche.