[Table of Contents]

 

TRIPTYCH

Sirianna Helleloid

 

  She is a vacuum cleaner: she cleans the vacuums that the floors dirtied. She empties their bags. She claps her hands like air clapping back into a vacuum. Thunder of flesh & flesh. Her ions run wide. When dogs come in from the storm they spray rain water. Fur shoots out like hands exiting a river. Her palms itch with eczema. She only laughs on the good days. She calls her mother Sir & her father a burnt coffee. // She looks like every painting, hair dangles her bits in a bathtub. She salts the coffee. A cubicle calls her, but she gives a bad number. She has her way with the copier. They slap her elbows with paper & call her witchbrew, call her broomstick handles, call her difficult. She walks out. She walks back in again. She walks in a circle that looks like a straight line. She becomes a wolverine so no one can tame the wildest tufts of her body. // She joins the march.                 She hangs out in the tree of her youth. She grows a garden of curses. She walks the length of a river on concrete. The matches she plays with are unlit. The fire comes from her elbows. When the police come she gives them a snow job. When the cops come she tells them slow lies. When she is jealous of new arrivals she becomes a bookie & all the dealers in the room watch her hands fly.

 

 

 

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This poem exists largely because I was playing with formatting options in google docs. I'd been experimenting with justifying poems & letting the line breaks (mostly) fall where they will. I like the clean look of a block of text with lines of exactly the same length; sometimes the overall visual of even lines winds up working better for me than a string of killer enjambments (& resulting visual unevenness) would. Using justification instead of left (or right) alignment led me to playing with the margins of poems; that landed me with a few poems that look like newspaper columns. From there, I started to think about different ways of laying out text to evoke other mediums. My first thoughts were using tables to replicate film reels & comic book pages. In the process of trying to make those work, I realized that I was actually making triptychs. There's something finicky, but satisfying with playing around with the presentation of the words in a word processing program, rather than the words themselves; it helps me step back & look at the whole, rather than get lost in the weeds of a specific line or image.