Elena Karina Byrne: Vanessa Beecroft’s Bodies Multiply

and they die and they price on request, they runaway, frequent

as the fashion brain can, as Kanye, as conceptual keeps its eye on

Africa’s hurt, face-down. How fast can you stare at each other in

a full room of people? Let’s say I can swallow caviar as easily as  

a water-mourned river stone the color of skin. Let’s say I bury it in

a sentence you recognize full of other sentences giving birth out of

thinning air and the need to be heard when the news has just dropped 

the next dummy bomb (dummy picture included). Let’s say there’s so 

many of us, naked or in bathing suits dark color of decomposing time, 

locked in a stance. Suffering, an auction for the poor, paints the inside 

of the skull the way a two-year-old draws on a wall. You are hard to get 

when it comes to remembering what must come next. Oh yeah: it’s always 

the luck body first and last, lasting until it doesn’t. Bella, it’s small army 

inside of you, sleepless as speech, won’t stand down, won’t listen.

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Copyright 2019 Elena Karina Byrne

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