MARCEL MOORE REDEEMS THE DISAVOWED
Between us there were no laced-up
bodices. We were two snake-lined
hands strewing the clutter of black
masks, white feathers, and tin
dishware into the mica layering
of the shore, wearing our talismans
of fish bones, our songs war-
wracked, sinewed with ash.
Our images in a montage
of cadmium. We shuttered
our eyes in an island prison,
our bodies a mapped logic,
ears pressed into sensory
hunger—a leitmotif of cagey
performances, multiplying
barbwire. By the end
of our journey, even
our silence had teeth.
EILEEN AGAR’S BLACK FLOWER SEA
I already knew there could be
no breathing through.
I knew this the way coral
reefs meet a shipwreck.
I wreathed the necks
of two heads with mollusks
and monsters, with lightning’s
arterial wiring, a blindfold stitched
from a debutante’s blue sash.
If they were to have bodies,
I could have assembled
nightdresses with tree bark,
but I let burlap and netting
clutch at each throat.
I already knew empathy
was a pretense of impalement
the way the molting moon drives a jeweled
stake through the impassable sea.
VALENTINE PENROSE SURFACES FROM A FOREST OF TEETH
As for proof of an irremediable malady,
there is the fire, icy girl,
and by fate by grain by satin
a cathedral on the carpet of yourself
spreads with interstellar dust.
Countess of Marble Columns
you gamble your descent against
the moon’s salted silver and fall free
from the vulture’s lacquered beak
into a pile of white veils held in an emerald’s
fist. You charm flèche and branch
into hieroglyphs, carve
fish scales into skeleton keys, draining January
nights of their icicled ships.
Queen of the Abyssal Waters
you leave the dark corners of the house
at the crossroads and slip into hyena skin
scattering men
with the most nonchalant of hands.
GRACE PAILTHORPE’S DREAM TRAJECTORY
Because I was field hospital when they wanted
femme fatale, doesn’t it follow that the knife
dipped in orange paint becomes an unconscious
language? Born of a seamstress, I chose incision
over the scherzo’s swiftness, the voltage of cartilage
and antiseptic blue for my transatlantic palette,
crossing speckled thrush with a troublesome girl.
My aim disengaged pistol and mannequin,
unharnessed trauma’s stiffened limbs,
illuminated the pairing of half-way house
with operating theater. I chose a scalpel’s
expulsion, a hawser sliced from mother bones.
In the salt-rimed ossuary, I retracted the tissues
of winter from hedgerows, draping a sheet over
the snow. Because I too had been little more than
stitches on a pale chest, each landscape I fell into
was a wound that couldn’t be dressed, and
each wound held the shape of my leaving.
KATI HORNA WITNESSES THE REVOLUTION
What goes in the basket emerges from the missing photos found long afterward in the forgotten crates of war. With my Rolleiflex I was asked to capture gun barrels, captives in prison, the detritus of a flea market. I was told these would be “new times,” and yet, from behind the scenes, a series of dolls’ heads were lined up for target practice, one eye an asterisk, the other a thimble filled with tar. So, I placed a woman’s mirage in a glass jug, her face dusted in a deadly radium glow. I stood leaning on a stack of bricks, pretending to shove roses through every crevice, to remind you of the overlooked children, a row of paper skeletons that wandered outside your gate. The shutter’s click gathered blown glass, women’s spines, and men in horned masks—nothing that could be filtered, nor fled from. What else could I become but another exile, my torn clothes a tool to scratch across photographic plates: an alchemist of debris, and that exile, another darkroom.
FRIDA KAHLO WELCOMES THE EXPATRIATES
I wear a harness, as I’m sure
you have seen. I will tell you
what the men don’t know:
this metal frame turns liquid
when my hair is smelted,
and, in wait, beneath me,
the flash of quetzal wings.
