Surrealist's Daughter, by Brittney Corrigan

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, by Dorothea Tanning (USA). 1943.

Surrealist’s Daughter
        
Mother’s automatic touch
is a brushstroke. It’s the
contrast of her meticulous
burgundy birth of me and
the green unconscious of
what I have stolen from her.
 
Whether I am waking or
sleeping, I am always at war
with nightmare and dream. I
conjure a sister to comfort me,
but she only props blindly,
doll-headed, and leans.
 
Here at the top of the stairs
is a cage of shredding. Giant
compass of leaves. Mother
is behind which door?
Mother is in the desert
tending her lion-faced dogs.
 
The sunflower’s psychic
petals are ochre-electric.
Their offense stands my
hair on end, whips it up
like a crescendo of violins
in the theatre’s colourless dark.
 
The flower’s Fibonacci
face has at its center
Mother’s eye. It fixes me,
linened and oiled, in my lifted
shock. But see how I am
ready for more pluck and tear.
 
These broken tendrils at my
button-booted feet, are they
Mother’s arms, phantoms
of the woman-body that made
me? Why can I not step over
to the light-opened door?

Brittney Corrigan

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collection Navigation (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2012) and the chapbook 40 Weeks (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she is the poetry editor for the online journal Hyperlexia: poetry and prose about the autism spectrum (http://hyperlexiajournal.com/). Brittney lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is both an alumna and employee of Reed College. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.