Jehanne Dubrow
Voyeurs
Brussels, 1994
Near the careful lines of the Grand Place, the pink
and purple canopies, the marble child
forever pissing in his marble sink,
we ate the perfect Belgian meal of frites
with mayonnaise and moules cooked in white wine
and endive served with mustard vinaigrette.
My mother talked about cables dispatched
from Africa. Two groups, she said between bites,
the Hutus and Tutsis. At first we laughed,
the names like made-up words in schoolyard songs,
or sounds a baby makes, vowels liquefied
like chocolate truffles melting on the tongue.
Machetes, she explained, to hack hundreds
in half as quickly as a knife slices
a plate of greens. Or else the crooked blade
that short tribes use to cut the cockroaches
(the taller tribes) and bring them down to size.
Some worshippers were kneeling in a church.
First, doors were barred, torches lit outside,
then fire swallowed air. We closed our eyes.
Man's inhumanity to man, we sighed,
and ordered crème brûlée and coffee for dessert.
Old Town
In Warsaw: reconstructed
from rubble in the decade after WWII.
Real history could never look so good.
Instead, patinas have been painted on
to show false wear on walls that haven't stood
five centuries of dust and human touch,
just fifty years of tourist industry.
If prawda signifies the truth, not much
is true when every ancient coat of arms,
each red-tiled roof, each Art Nouveau salon
de thé was turned out in a factory,
trompe l'œil to double-cross the eye or charm
vacationers. The locals know a con:
the new-made-old, 3-D enough to last.
But even they prefer a forgery
to walking through the ruins of the past.
The Diplomat's Daughter
She drinks the tea, her lips kissing the bone
edge of the china cup, a sip too fine
and smooth, rehearsed as choreography.
Her pinky angles just the right degree.
Who taught her to sit like a princess,
glass-still while conversations spin across
the room? Small drops that trickle from her mouth,
falling onto the linen tablecloth,
glint like citrines before they disappear.
She could almost be the girl in a Vermeer:
posed, a face of painted porcelain
that catches light, her glowing underskin.
Except, while no one looks, incisors snap
against her tongue, the closing of a trap.
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Therese Chabot creates delicate, ephemeral installations – carpets, dresses and crowns – using flower petals and natural materials to speak of the stages of life and the paths we are given to choose from. |
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