Kollektives Klopfen

Besonderen Dank an die Stimmen von 

Feline Krey
Julia Geiß
Miriam Rieck
Sarah Kramer
Sarah Paar
Son Lewandowski

Text: Rike Hoppse

Collective tapping
(English transcript) 

A horoscope app spits the phrase at me that I’m a construction site.
A young woman can do anything, but she should also do everything,
writes Franziska Schutzbach.

1 week in various positions
lying under the gutted trailer and from there
tapping rust flakes from the skeleton with a small hammer,
which I have now decided to take care of.
Care-work for a trailer that was born the same year
the same year as I was born.

The trailer is named Frieder.
Frieder is rusty plus wet from the inside
it has been littered
over decades.

Frieder is not dense and attracts animals.
The other day in the rain a mouse got into it.
When the animal saw me, it went back to the puddles through one of the 100 cracks.

Frieder’s openness to different sides
offers so much surface for attack,
at night I’m afraid for her.
Frieder in the dark when she stands there so alone.

Dare me to use the Flex
that my father sends to the construction site in a wheeled suitcase.
Massaging Frieder’s rust flakes,
which has passed its zenith at 25,
like old dander
of a scratched animal.
After 7 days the left thumb has a hinge weakness.

My body is a complex tipping switch system,
sometimes it tips over.

Like an unbordered lake in the summer, when it is thoughtlessly littered
with toxic stuff.
I don’t want to have to put a fence
around my lake,
for it to be respected.

To be a green tilted lake, in which I myself
don’t want to swim in anymore.
Then algae grows in myself.

Who tilts my system?

Summer. Rain. Torrents fall vertically.
Infrastructures collapse.
Frieder goes down.
Funny coincidence: the storm that sweeps over us has the same old German name as my father.
I ask the Internet. Who is allowed to name a storm front?
Until 1997, all lows basically had female first names, all highs male.

I buy a sheet metal strip for 27.98 from the prokilo man,
I want a new piece of skin for Frieder.
The prokilo man charges me per kilo.
The wobbly steel strip like a 2m long eel in the hands,
at the sides it bites into the hand.

The attempts to get Frieder as smooth down to the bones
as in the hardware store advertisement.
Boundlessly knocking against the 29 year old skeleton,
until the rusty blood-red steel gives in and
crunches away like a chewed lollipop.
The result a broken smoothed body.
I drag him behind me.

Happy surrender.

I rub Frieder so thickly and imprecisely with Rostegal,
that the red color drips bloody under Frieder on the floor.
Frieder runs out. Nobody is looking, except me.
Who cares?

A new kind of accident happens.
Getting so strong that I break everything.
The riveting pliers. The spray gun. The vacuum cleaner.
The shower head. All within two weeks.

Not being used to your own strength.

While trying to poke the first rivets into the roof foil,
I squeeze my left breast between two pliers levers.
The yellow-blue discoloration
like a homemade hickey.
Whoever designed these pliers
can only have had flat bodies in mind.
Everything about these riveting pliers doesn’t work for mine.
No matter how sweetly I talk to the rivet, scold it
and put all my strength into it, it doesn’t bang for me.

If I were as thin
as the Calzedonia mannequins at the central station,
I’d have broken down today.

I’m getting a paunch.

PMS.
Premenstrual syndrome.
Monsoon-like rains announce themselves.
An offshoot of Storm front Klaus.
I dressed Frieder up like a wrinkled old Orka –
black-and-white covering foil borrowed from the janitor of the Abenteuerhallen,
the foil as heavy as I was as a 9 year old child.
32 kg, I remember exactly.

Not asking for help idiotic accustomed basic principle.
Alone under a gray sky
I tug with the force of my anger
the plastic skin heavy as a child
onto the color-damp steel skeleton,

Earthworms and mulch rain down on my hair,
the damp Rostegal sows micro-scratches on my body,
the operating system,
which tries to hold itself
On a tippy ladder.

Practicing accepting help.
I have my father visit me.
He wears the same cut-off jeans
and the same length leg hair as me.
The pustules in my cleavage
are becoming more and more Christmas cake
he says on a July morning
with the heat lurking outside the front doors.
I think he means crumble cake,
but it only occurs to me in the evening.
Dead tired I pick rust out of my rusty nose
at the open window,
deliberately and clearly
and I don’t care.

There is the possibility of allying.
I call my strongest friend.
Together in a heat wave
we shoot the rivets into the roof foil for a day,
I make 8, he makes maybe 90.
He says he likes the pox from the riveter noise.
I like that he helps me and doesn’t joke about my strength.
By the end of the day, Frieder is dense.
We stare groggily at plywood boards in front of the hanger
on our backs to the sky
and share one soft drink, too tired to get up,
thick wood pigeons fly into the yew tree across the street
and build something together.

Overheated weeks
Feline, Line, Miri, Thewes and the two Sarahs come to visit
and bend down next to me.
We sound like ponies galloping together
with our hammers on the steel.
We practice being louder
than we think we’re allowed to be.
Enduring the uncomfortable feeling
to the point where I think, who cares?
Softly padded sky.
Standing overheated in the cooled evening
and steaming like a lake at dawn.
Going for a swim in myself.
It is August and I have not yet tilted.