Dutch Lump-rumpled buns gurn over soft eggs, over-churned mayonnaise on everything even fries. Lapping at the upward swathe of the weather-moon makes you want to varnish your own arm, and eat that too. Lay your ample frame under silver halide and contemplate each pore collecting refuse from cobbled paths in darkened alleyways, inert-gas lights haunt the girl walking with her back to the canal and the sign that reads gesloten. Lettuce on plates. Slather on lavish-thick like sea scum on the gel-bellied whale, pressing an ever more present sonogram into the sea wall where glass eels slot into latch-key diagrams to hide the smell of their DNA. The sternum connects the clavicle, stars hide the oldest of their songs. Lace curtains are gamma rays. Cocktail umbrellas hover above glass and the meisje’s red hair is still visible above the sand, who shot and killed Nazis. And in Haarlem tonight the woman in the window is awfully present. Women in the Sahara. Women in Dublin back-alleys and migrant workers in Dubai. Amsterdam is like Phoenix, someone said - Rotterdam is like New York. Buildings slung wide and bunker-sunken like wooden peg blocks, wharf lapping the ashes out of their reclaimed beer steins and bombed out of all recognition. Jo-Ella Sarich Jo-Ella Sarich has practised as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Cleaver Magazine, Blackmail Press, Barzakh Magazine, Poets Reading the News, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. https://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/, @jsarich_writer.
2 Comments
4/10/2017 05:04:15 am
feel free to use any of the images of my paintings you need to illustrate this wonderful poem!
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Jo-Ella Sarich
4/17/2017 09:02:53 pm
Wow! This is very humbling. Thank you so much for your kind comment and for permission to use an image of one of your paintings. I am a huge fan!
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