Roots: Sold to an Unidentified Telephone Bidder
Liz Gallagher

For Frida Kahlo

They said she was “A petite wife who sometimes dabbled in paint”
So she lets her wedding dress drip in blood
and laughs at the memory of her full skirt
and shawls hung out to air between the skyscrapers of New York.
She twists her braided hair and heavy jewelry round the loose anchor of a steamship chugging out of the Hudson harbour.
A quarter moon romps in bedraggled clouds.

She is a modern woman at the end of a bench.
A foetus, a female abdomen, a pelvic bone, an orchid,
papier-mâché on a balloon, all line up for scrutiny.
She encourages Santa Claus to have a perm in a beauty parlour
and hang alongside the mirror above her canopy.
Afterwards they play a game called “exquisite corpse”—
where he draws a head and folds, she draws a torso and folds
until they circle themselves with mangoes and never hide in footnotes.

Monkeys and parrots wrap themselves round her with silk ribbons.
She whistles for toy skeletons to lie at her feet.
She is one-half of the “Love Embrace of the Universe”
and her disintegrating corset rises
from a fantastic vein.

Does her gaze ever rest?
Or does it stay latched to a street car?
I see her with a Black & Decker,
she is under a shrouded sheet,
making back and forth motions,
the reciprocating blade shredding a heart,
a handrail
and bust-length self-portraits.

Breakfast Cereals, Picasso, and a Sexual Snap
Liz Gallagher

I want to write about breakfast cereals
since they determine the type of person we become.
Rice Krispies: snap, crackle and pop—I loved the tiny boxes they came in.
Cornflakes: heaped with sugar, neither wet nor soft but ultra crispy.
Truthfully, though, neither fully took off in our house.

I decide to skip cereals from today’s writing. How about Picasso?

Wow, at 12 he was maybe a dosser at school.
An early sexual snap was when he jotted down
a sketch of a donkey mounting a she-ass
in the margins of his copy book. Cool!

I wonder how his teacher reacted. “Picasso, to the corner,
knees on sugar and rip up that filth.”

OK, this is decidedly better than breakfast cereals, I’ll keep going.

He had a studio in the Barrio Xino, frequented cabarets.
Mixed with sailors, beggars and whores.
On the same street these days, vendors sell
large animals trapped in small cages.

I wonder if Picasso ate much breakfast cereal.

I bet he feasted on raw garlic
tightly rubbed onto the soft white insides of a baguette.
A tomato clasped by a curved hand would then be furiously squeezed and smeared over the bread until it ran red
with juice and sticky, stray pips.

He is in his nineties, days before his death,
and sketching: “dislocated and pathetic visions of the female sex.”
He had the “libido of seeing” (Jean Clair).

If childhood teachers don’t react badly to copulating donkeys,
breakfast can make you who you are,
regardless of cereal content.



The Wrong Miracle
Liz Gallagher

The wrong miracle comes from the pulse at your
throat. I think about hiding it behind cacti. I should

try to grab the rabbit’s torn corpse from a beloved
dog’s mouth. But even that wouldn’t fix things.

The tears in the wind are hollow, days loosen;
they knee-jerk breath into something that is rotting.

A polyglot would know how to say the unspeakable.
You hold my fingers and bend them backwards,

making the palm of my hand into an outer planetary
terrain of bumps and crevices. And you are a space

walker, pinning flags, popping pills and miming love
through the bubbles of a glass pressure helmet. And I,

a solitary Princess, blow kisses in the wrong direction.

An Agenda in a Green Zone
Liz Gallagher

Will is a flavour diluting under the tongue
or a blog keeper in a gelatinous state.
Semantic atrocities snipe at a peep-hole.
Iraq-agenda-government-daunting:
words that flare up in cap pistols
or tap-dance through the margins of political speeches.

He sometimes writes on plimsolls,
uses the hook of a hanger
and dabs the pads of his fingers
with methylated spirits.

He asks why they meet in the green zone
among those who pull strings from the inside of pockets.
And each new day is a wishbone snapped unevenly.

The ambulance comes twice,
a police escort for his wife paled on a stretcher.
She remarks about the sky being big.
She is reading about the politician who has lost his second jaguar,
he had been seen wrapping his secretary up in a Persian rug
while trying to dupe customs and excise into thinking
it was love for sale.

His neighbour says, “I want to walk to swell my knees
so that it will be easy for them to suck the liquid clear
and then I will show you how to make vanilla flan
for your sick wife.”

He hears the echo of a voice he knows,
but can’t place, singing.
Then he is at home,
flattening tin foil on a baking tray.
The radio says: “Normality will be resumed”
and he switches on the timer.