CRUSH

How is it that cars take on the personhood of their owners? Does everything in our possession adopts our smell, our level of chaos or care? My sister used to drive a red Honda Civic. I stole it from her many times, once crashed it in the night & parked it where she left it, denying the damage in the morning. She drove that thing, filled with teenagers’ spilled McDonald’s Cokes, bong water & liquids that gummed into the upholstery, until the carpets came up & eventually came out altogether. The car became a symbol for her life, our lives, which were then falling apart.

The skin wrinkles. In time, we are crushed by gravity & oxidation, like the skin of a car can be crushed. There is a tension of opposites between the idea of metal as armour, as protection, & the reality of its permeability: thin as skin, pierced through, bent by impact.

This issue, & perhaps Maite’s¹ images, ask us what a body can endure. Dancing, sometimes literally, between armour & exposure. A car, a capsule, an extended body, can have parts fallen off & taped up & still carry on.

There is violence in the word crush, in all its meanings. The weight of unclaimed potential that hovers over romantic encounter; the internal pressures of anxiety that can cripple the psyche; & yet it’s a weight we long for, like the heft of another’s flesh on our chest. Having a crush can be light as air through a window, or heavy like being cubed & compressed in a wrecking yard.

Perhaps we are all becoming our own salvage yard. In some ways our spare parts, the parts we might have thrown away, may in time serve a new purpose.

Cars are reflective objects: the flash of metal, the rear-vision glance of a mirror. Cars offer us to ourselves, like Narcissus had his pool of water. I often daydream about owning a black WRX, the first car I learned to drive at thirteen. But it is, like Narcissus in the water, an illusion. & still, I like the way it feels to run the hand of my mind along it. There is power in the image, slick & masc, & in how a body might inhabit, even imaginally, that power. The imagination, like a vehicle, is something that we can be seated in & drive around to reach different states.

Maite’s performance, shown here in stills, is also about reflective gaze. MOMOSTAR², an alias, or vehicle of iconography & pop debris, is dragged around as they perform before a circle of viewers, yet they hold the camera & the locus of gaze (another kind of power) turning it back on the viewer. Like seeing oneself in the side-door mirror, both part of & outside at the same time.

Where I grew up, you needed a car if you were ever to leave. I noticed it was boys who had cars & I did the math. I did whatever I could to get one, or get in one, & drove from neighbourhood to neighbourhood with whomever would take me. The cars broke down or crashed, the crushes, crushed, were left behind, but my body, the conduit between vehicles, kept going.

The poems in this issue were chosen for their substance & surface. For the way they reflect off each other & constellate parts that we hope form a circuitry; your attentive reading & listening, the spark.

Unexpectedly, a few bugs flew into this issue. Another small being with a crusted outer layer protecting a fragile, liquid interior.

I’m so grateful for the impetus of this issue, Maite’s photographs, as well as the hours we spent working side by side at Present Tense last year while they were artist in resident; for the many detours we took into process & at times, crush fall-out. Connecting, in this issue, the images of star-adorned flesh & the images of crushed cars (their deep fascination) really clicked something into place for me. Following this line of enquiry has given me a new way to think about salvage, armouring & perceptibility, & I’m so grateful for that new highway in my mind.

Bianca Pina / Present Tense³

The launch event for PTZ Edition 2 will be on February 2026

Tickets are HERE

You can listen to the audio-zine & buy a printed copy HERE