Land Art in the Silk City
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They filmed the paint factory from the second story of our house, all those cameras looking out from us. We were the evening news, long as buildings were ablaze. Or, how the boy up the street dabbled in mesmerism, staring at a telephone wire and calling a name, rubbing letter against letter until a spark took flight down the line. She picked up always to a swirling sound. And, how no one knows what’s brewing next door until one barrel after another shoots fifty feet into the air and stars the night. What becomes visible in calamity quickly burns to nothing. He thought it best to send away for another guide: what art would power him to turn the river back to silk, and make the world watch it burn. [End Page 209]
Rosa Alcalá, a native of New Jersey, is author of two chapbooks of poems, Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna) and Undocumentary (Dos Press). She has translated Lila Zemborian’s Guardians of the Secret (forthcoming from Noemi Press) and co-translated (with Mónica de la Torre) Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna). She is an assistant professor at El Paso’s University of Texas, where she teaches creative writing.
