A Repeating Dream I’m Belly-Down at Eleven
beneath barbwire like bedsprings during night-climbs, dirt under
my shirt, saving babies in the dark slide of building’s vents into
canvas flap backs of trucks, a chaos of fleeing. Tell me, isn’t that art?
An in-crisis or crime-pull toward and away from. Color blocks
moving toward and away–– painting is a leavetaking. Death is
a leavetaking. Fleeing, great grandfather out of fear, changed his
name with his family’s country, confounded something that is still
missing there where I see the truck that fell off the cliff toward
an ocean blur, rusted before I was born, bitten by cactus needles and
fennel weed, my language in an unbroken string of cruelty of color, too
far away to see. Look at all disquiet-pictures that fell into our laps, Three
times the head of the dead daily coming blur-back out of family history-
chaos like a mother’s hairpins falling from the pine trees, dried blood
hemming the floor of your bedroom’s closed door, child’s bodycolor of rust…
Copyright 2019 Elena Karina Byrne
Elena Karina Byrne’s publications include Squander (Ominidawn, 2016)
Beautifully surreal.
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