Brett-Candace's Page

This piece is an ekphrastic poem based off of the painting, "Shelley's Funeral Rutes", by Louis-Edward Fournier. An image of the painting and a description can be found below the poem.



Percy Burning

Still faces, bowed or gazing,
staring and sallow, watch you
as they’ve always watched you:
One, folding like a paper crane,
kneels with eyes to the sand
he gathers as a souvenir;
beside him, another
hugs fingers in fingers—
yesterday’s pointers
console each other now,
mourning
a missed chance to… Continue

I belted out lines of Bob Marley’s
“One Love” in the shower as the small,
spattering drops fell down
my hard body, stampeding
through my streets with beer glazed
eyes and idle hands—grabbing
every piece of me they ran by.

Let that rain fall where it wants to:
seeing penises and vaginas
replace my face,
watching the cards play out,
and hearing my blue magic wish:
to go into a cocoon. Sometimes
life is so loud that all I hear are
high-pitched sounds:

The telephone screeching like I
stepped on it… Continue

I remember it through the legs of the table
I laid under, watching my mother work.
Out the front door are the wooden stairs
my eldest sister ran down with a white bag,
and the wrought iron rails she swung on
with one foot in the air, a new mouth opening
on her right ankle to scream with her.
The stowaway glass now exposed
by a tear in the trash bag, like a
rattlesnake’s tail thread through
a slit in the seat of the devil’s pants.

I remember a brown kitchen. There is the
sink I once washed dishe… Continue