Elena Karina Byrne: Reality may still be unacceptable Gerhard Richter

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… 

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Copyright 2019 Elena Karina Byrne

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