Art: Thrallment of Reincarnation by Eric Chamberlain
A Bolt is not a Screw
It’s a bolt.
Its threads are coarse or fine, the little ridges wide | | | | or narrow |||| depending on how tight you
want to be bound with me. They hold things together through force.
I can snap a bolt like a relationship if I tighten it too much, but you beat me to it.
I can cross-thread the bolt too, which really means there was a way this was going to work out,
but the direction you took us prevented that.
I have to be careful of my materials: steel and aluminum, hardened and soft, stoic and
vulnerable. They can freeze together. Over time, the heat of one mars the other, welding and
melding, but it really just means they have to be cut apart. By torch. By saw.
And there’s the sizing, but we always knew you were a little more Standard. Me, a little more
international, a little more Metric.
In drastic measures, I could use the wrong socket to undo a bolt. A 10 millimeter fits over the top
of a 3/8” and work. It’s sloppy. It’s bad form. But it always manages to separate a marriage of
metal and metal, or any two things.
Bolts are phallic, little ribbed dicks designed for screwing, but they aren’t screws. Studs are
phallic too. They’re bolts that stick out of something you tighten a nut onto.
I don’t like this metaphor because it’s binary. Your emptiness being filled by my protrusion, or
maybe it’s my emptiness being filled by yours.
Maybe we’re on threaded rod
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
with no beginning or end. Just a rod on which we’ve twisted toward each other, meeting in the
middle, our faces locked tight against the other. And maybe we will twist together until we shear
the rod completely, breaking our tightness, and twist on down to something else.
Or maybe it’s not as romantic, there not being enough torque between us, and I will simply
loosen over time, and fall out as you turn a corner to somewhere else without me.
The heads of bolts are hexagonal like honeycombs, all sockets made for extracting them either 6-
point or 12-point constellations designed for removal.
I think
this
met
aph
or
is stuck. It’s gunked up. It’s greasy. I am a bolt, but you are not the emptiness I enter
searching for fulfillment. No. You are the wren ch that loosens me from myself, from my
rust. You are the slick oil that lubricates my thre ads. But that’s not quite right.
We are bolts. All of us, I think. And we reinforce each other, the surface we share secured by our
mutual tension, by our respective torque values.
Yes, this is much better.
If one of us loosens, the other can hold the weight, for a time. One of us can hold the torque until
the other can fasten itself back in. We can take breaks.
Our surface is shared and while holding to that steel or aluminum may be more difficult on our
own, we can do it, hold together, our shared tension less than our tension alone.
Yes, our shared tension less than our tension alone.
Because we are bolts.
Not screws.
About the author:
Jake Zawlacki lives and writes in the swamps of Louisiana. His work has been published in The Citron Review, Gravel, Litro, and others.
In the artist’s words:
Eric Chamberlain. “Wraitheon, digital realm of the Empyreal flow, ghosts of flowers singing within living architecture and currents of music slithering through noctilucent angel sighs.” This piece reveals the bursting eternal energy of the human soul. As an artist, I seek to show multiple figures, ideas, perspectives and layers at once, combing the physical and the spiritual. These images were created digitally, with the exception of Cinetecture, which is from a series of works comprising sculpture, painting and photography. My goal as an artist is twofold: create an expressive personal outlet for the flow of energy and vision within me while evoking or stirring something in the viewer emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.
Please see more at https://www.angelicengineering.com/