Ekphrasis at Le Swamp, by Andy Demczuk

Artwork and photograph by Andy Demczuk (USA) contemporary

Ekphrasis at Le Swamp

Dancing afterhours at an art show in a basement. Knock-off dragonflies from a Tiffany Lamp
pollinate the grey petaled sprinkler as water showers down on the paintings.
Battery lighting captures the pigment drips. 
Into the nothingness of the ground I went. 
The process of dissecting nostalgia is tricky—a lot of moving things around like a paragraph, 
Or a neon tower in the desert that reads:
Coloratura
I tie the strings to a rusty water pipe that runs a staircase angle out of the brick wall. 
Diagram of frog organs blueprint out the gallery. 
I didn’t know glass could be fluffy. The pink insulation of DNA, 
Looks like the inside of my skull would feel if I knew how I felt.
The Tiffany lamp is a glowing orb,
Sporting an unaffordable stain glass mosaic that fractures 
Into bone marrow with shards of figurative insects.
I tend to think better in that light, when I have these creatures burrow my soft edges
And my hands don’t look so vivid.
Dragonflies’ sanguine eyes expand, pulsating rubies
With every lie I call truth, with every stanza of Faerie Queene. 
One painting in the exhibition is of a thatch roof cottage in Brittany.
Other portraits are of other bourgeois symbols of jouissance:
Birds, flowers, parks and dogs.
I picked them out at the store as puppies, paws on the cage.
I can’t get the numbers right and a strange chord sounds off in the distant hills.
The lines care where you blur. 
Though, every now and then,
I’ll hear a 5 longing
To be baby blue.
To resolve to 1 in the song.
In a little voice over and over.
Can I please be the pastel sage Vuillard used for dresses.
As the numbers dance with paint, the Particle Critic shows up in a glitch—delayed in graphics.
The paintings peel off the dirty walls and dangle there lifeless.
Errour crawls out my desk and eats the wood like an acid beetle: forming the glowing edges 
of nirvana—pulling me inside.
My past life as a kite permeates into view as the house drifts off into space leaving its
DNA-newsprint-shroud. I lick my lips and clinch my capo, 3rd fret,
To shake off that heavy dust spewing from those
Fraudulent dragonflies.

Andy Demczuk

Andy Demczuk was born in Oceanside, California. He studied at the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood concentrating on guitar performance. He then moved to the French Alps, where he led international volunteers in art and music workshops facilitating intercultural collaborations in an association funded by the French government. Andy writes fiction, poetry, and music, and pursues studio arts, using acrylic and multimedia, video, and sound design. In Fall 2019 he taught high school English in Spain. He is currently pursuing an MA in English at ETSU in Johnson City, TN.