Elena Karina Byrne: Artist Sophie Calle, now take care of yourself

No one gets to be happy here unless happy means Pain

is exquisite, if you let it. Follow us to the animal bedroom,

through the drive-through chapel, walkabout child fairytale

day hour it takes to become a stranger, where you can’t see

you, your hand on the heart like a small anvil. Where mothers

will make mistakes politicians appear, speaking from mounting

sea trash and border wire’s meshed lingo, what fathers take can

make gunpowder-snuff for the blind. But come. Come here anyway

to this continent in a floating wardrobe boat. Follow the past to this

missing solitude place. There will be a money jar, pink hot water bottle,

one duck-handled umbrella gun waiting for you. This is where you will

weep from your eyes only, making no sound, as if your foreign voice was

taken away elsewhere, separated, voyaged far from your body, farther,

like an orphan not knowing her home was just a cage unlocked all along.

Elena Karina Byrne’s many publications include Squander (Omnidawn, 2016).

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