Elena Karina Byrne

INSTEAD, THE HEAD: LORNA SIMPSON 

Instead          the head is turned away, obscured, the head is turned on
by a winter bonfire flowers rising from the top of the head like
memory from the hair’s bird-auction knitted between dusk & dawn.

Instead          one eye’s opened ashtray, or both obscured, follow in
the pattern filigree-knit dark, like language on the skin that like them, 
won’t take no for an answer, won’t wear you out, won’t stick the chicken

         wishbone in the throat before sleeping. But who will witness
an error in these repetitions, in all circles as you fall square, feel your
body parts, feel the ground sliding from under you like the very last part
of your photo skin wishing itself forward & away, its last text turned
film-back through US history’s hate smelling like your burnt hair of 
chip cookies & baby milk.

Instead         your body viewed from behind, forever
                     breaking its invisible silken butterfly on the collarbone’s only wheel.

NAN GOLDIN FUCKS WITH 2020 MIRRORS

As if ambiguity’s onsite workload whistle caught us 
in the act of climax breathing like oars dragging 
the cold slickwater back. Breathing an orchard 
over the skin, caught staring, starting in on the face just 
long enough to know this: no street creed corner divides 
asphalt & fault into final our dirt, no male from female. 
As if this country’s added lack of empathy hours didn’t
already add up to this funeral of nail clippers, police 
peel & violent laughter’s perfume bottles left bedside 
where one quarter horse half-sleeps in his musk – these
limits of grief can’t be stopped or looked at for long
in the eye: Why I’m no one’s fallen apple wearing her
rind-green dress. I forget how to see the oil-unwashed 
moon declaring my ex-husband’s dirty water tale. 
I’m over an overkill silence. The sex minutes turn
into a still-life void, another woman’s face at a price. 
Nobody’s business that their features are sleeping inside
my horse’s body now, made up of water, dirty bath 
wash having no single declaration expression
left to drain. This might yet have me here, laid
bare, trapped in passion & still pleading for fruit.

A Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient, Elena Karina Byrne is the author of five books including the forthcoming If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn, 2020) and No, Don’t (What Books Press, 2020). Recent work can be found in The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, Poetry, Plume, Entropy, BOMB, Volt, Kyoto Journal, Poetry International, Adroit Journal, LARB, and New American Writing. While attending AUSB’s Writing & Contemporary Media program, Elena is working in new genres and completing a book of essays called Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire. 

Elena is a freelance lecturer, private editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry, and in 2019, her term for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. She is currently teaching online classes for Poetry Barn, Poetry School UK, and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center.