Museum in War Zone by Rebekah Curry

Here, this unreal world: where the excavated torso

of Venus invites our gaze, where Christ

is always being crucified, where a barefoot girl

stands in a photograph, blankly pubescent.

We walk through an echoing silence, knowing

that all things are possible while the dead still live,

while the sky remains one color, while the limbs

of a lacquered nude are poised in its dance.

For a moment, we are a portrait. Then the lights

must dim. The doors must be locked behind us.

 

Outside, it is winter. The possibility of sirens

waits in the darkness as you walk

past some nameless rubble, back to a place

familiar from hunger and the smell of dust.

In thirty years, an echoing museum

will acquire the print of a white-boned corpse

crushed by a beam, and quietly display it

as an artifact of the century’s foreign war.

~ Rebekah Curry

Rebekah Curry is in her final year of study at the University of Kansas, where she is majoring in Classics. Her work has also appeared in inkscrawl, Antiphon, Strange Horizons, and the two books that have resulted from 150 Kansas Poems.

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64. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Rebekah Curry

Think of the girl (or boy; it doesn’t matter)
too lost in her own head to hear the bird.
Quick, it would say, find them, find them,
but she misses the direction. Deep inside,
a history of birdsong. Twit twit jug jug
tereu it goes back thousands of years,
to a wood where you can never find your way.
She blinks and realizes the glinting heat
outside. The sound is already gone.
The empty air falls heavy on her ear.

— Rebekah Curry

10. Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Art Film

Imagine it after everything: it would be the same.

Coarse grass, outcrops of tawny rock. Thickets

of trees matted with dry leaves. The twisted remnants

of a wire fence wreathed with brambles. Maybe

a bird flying in an unforeseeable direction,

and, naturally, the wind, blowing southwest.

Lastly, a small figure walking down the highway

over the eroded paint and cracked asphalt,

singing because there’s no one to hear it.

— Rebekah Curry

 

Rebekah Curry’s primary qualifications are having lived in the state for over sixteen years and having made attempts at poetry for over ten. She is currently a student at the University of Kansas, where she is majoring in Classics.