The poet presents three poems from her fifth collection, If This Makes You Nervous.
Elena Karina Byrne
A Walkabout In Andrew Wyeth’s Painting
Rachel Whiteread: It’s So
I was always like an old child
—Chantal Akerman
You could almost lick those sugar cubes stacked in sleep
find the hexahedron ark floating today’s ocean missing
its human animal leaving home Grief is an impression
of a missing table under the table a body departed withdrawn
from the body floating the color of Halloween candy
wrappers. I lived a whole afternoon under the leftover
house boards in our dying garden after my one sister
died Half-sister half death of my thinking about death
at nine A black hole can be measured by the sheer speed of
what is orbiting around it If you withdraw one object from
its space in a room measure what’s left all the empty parts
you have a child inside a box A box thinking outside itself
Sophie Calle, Now Take Care of Yourself
No, no one
gets to be happy here unless happy means Pain
is exquisite. Follow us to the animal bedroom, all the way to
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 sea-trash
& border wire’s mounting, meshed lingo. There will be a money jar,
pink hot water bottle, one duck-handle umbrella gun waiting for
you. What fathers take from us makes gunpowder-snuff for the blind.
But come. Come here anyway to this continent in a floating wardrobe
boat. Follow the past to its missing solitude. This is where you will
weep from your eyes only, making no sound, as if, all along, your
voice voyaged away from cage, far, from your body.
