Two Fingers of Water, a chapbook of poem selections written by Oliva Milberg and translated by Cameron Lovejoy, is hand-sewn and letter-pressed in violet covers like the hue of dreams. Its text is symbolic, religious, contouring the a priori with a learned knowledge of order and religious drives. Lovejoy's English translation is divided from the Spanish original by illustrations done by LaDa6a: bodies—skeletal, fleshy, marble, heliotropic—praying. English poems come first. The illustrations, as though a bridge—become the physical between languages, leading the reader to Spanish. The tongue and the hand transcribing, uttering, caressing. This is a book about physicality, the body, and the corporeal involvement in and of the world, what surrounds a physical presence, languages transmuted.

However, there's translucence—how water shapes itself into its container—hugging, or being hugged by the over-reaches. Sharply, snaring this delicate weave of becoming one. Wager the water erotics—eco eros of the book: bodies churn out bodies—a body of water within another word.

This water transmutation between language and language. Hand-bound into an eternal object.

Two fingers of water—fingers belong to the water—to the thing filling the substance, shapes the container, or gives it life—that animation. The body becomes a container for life-giving nourishment.

Gossamer pages:

"Forty drops in / two fingers of water."

A matryoshka doll.

Something containing the next. Origin is irrelevant, and so is the Creator.

Something always exists within something else. A duplicate or a DNA transfer. This is a part of being on earth, of the earth, a terrestrial obligation:

"Maybe this soil / I scrub / has become my skin."

How to differentiate? Is this possible?

"Tal vez sea un gesto / demasiado obediente."

Maybe it's simply a gesture, maybe the differentiation is in the movement in between substance, that negative space through an apophatic devotion, searching for what's around the flesh.

Certainty awry.

The line break gives the gesture autonomy, bodies into the obedience.

It is still a gesture, but in the subjunctive—with or without obedience. The possibility of the gesture, the possibility of differentiation. It isn't even disobedience, there isn't a polarity or a binary, but simply a being. Of the world. The gesture that gestures.

Sunlight onto the body.

"Maybe" keeps on showing up: "Maybe this soil," "tal vez sea un gesto." I'm deliberately using the Spanish original in its subjunctive form to form an idea of possibility, a vision of a potential gesture. "Maybe" is the word of creation in this collection. "Maybe" translates into "like," a metamorphosis in the metaphoric action. It's not that "maybe" is actually being translated, but the language is taking an overtone of an open-ended creation. Everything could be something else. In naming, the possibility of the name begins to expand and pass over boundaries. Names are carriers—holding the smithereens of self. A holding in the chrysalis—an expansive transubstantiation. Unlink a body whose form changes with time, the name changes and grows within context. Milberg's "maybe" has taken the religious, which is substantially, super-actively present, only it's no longer dogmatic, no longer placed into a symbol, and has become an aura or the physical substance of earthly delights through a spiritual encounter of the name.

"Count, yes, the drops that fall / in a whisper, that sound like prayers."

Telluric language of touch and earth and the earthly matter dips the readers in. The earthly and the pagan exist within the religious, or is it the religious within the earthly? Maybe God is in the moss, as much as the Devil is, and Milberg knows this duality exists in the ugly, uncontrollable overgrowths of life, just like the dogs of Socaire: "The earth hardens / on their noses. Their eyes / are all that shine / through the dust." Here, the metaphor is gone, the earth hardens on the nose of the dogs; sculptural, dusty allure. Beauty and wretchedness intact.

In the illustrations: the drop and the sun are both, are one, are life giving. Nourishing bodies, the body, yes.