Installation, by Helena Feder

Installation 
 
Like a land down under? I said to my friend 
who lives in Australia, our faces drawn 
into two of several oval holes positioned
to frame and multiply inside a black box, 
a metaphor expanding animals of current
alternating in reflection, blue-red-green 
receding past astonished expressions. 
 
Yeah, Karl said, I feel at home, his phone 
out to record our double neon hydra. Later
we’d look at the screen and wonder how he got
the photo without dropping the device inside,
smashing lights and choreographed mirrors, 
setting off alarms as shards fly into our eyes. 
Fuck, he’d have yelled, fuck, over the noise 
and chaos of panicked guards, and I’d have  
only a moment to focus one good eye 
on the darkness we knew was there.
 
Helena Feder
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Helena Feder is the author of Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (2014/2016) and many articles, essays, interviews, and poems. She is the editor of several journal issues and two books: You Are the River (NCMA 2021) and Close Reading the Anthropocene (Routledge 2021). She is Associate Professor of Literature and Environment at ECU, and currently working on her first book of poems.