by Irina Tall (Novikova)
The Island is a Territory of Echoes
In the sea, they say, there is an island made of bottles and other trash.
Plastic bags become clouds and the air a place for opportunistic birds.
From Report From an Island, Carolyn Forché
I. The Shore
They say, but they are wrong.
The word trash implies order
and the acquiescence of a built object
to its own helpless cessation.
This word is the shore’s deceitful whisper.
The island is a territorial dispute.
The island is a laboratory of revived instincts:
plastics are refined from petroleum,
as they-who-say ought to know,
and petroleum is the distillation of dinosaurs
and the unflowering plants they fed on,
when not feeding on each other,
and those were all extrusions of the sea
that rejected the sea,
later peeled away from slick
dissolution into the sand
to be reshaped for the shore’s convenience.
Seagulls, having once rejected the sea,
learned hostility of the shore as well
and now poach from both in guttural fits.
The shore’s guile: in early chemical science,
a derived substance perpetuates an echo
of the substance that engendered it;
having suited convenience,
and freshly expelled from the shore’s sight,
the island’s echoes pick fights with their descendants.
II. The Corals
No one talks about it, but people look to the sea
toward where the plane went down.
Fresh corals shelter flickering scales,
eroding their polymers in rows:
a silt chorus spitting up the principles
of a colony newly under martial law,
the jury of a descending arc
culled and called to order.
The island is a rumor.
III. The Geckos
Geckos can’t blink, so they lick their own eyes to keep them wet. Their bite is gentle.
The shore never blinks
because the island never blinks.
Foam on the shore is an eyelid
that refuses to close.
We could pretend that one day
geckos will invent opposable thumbs
to lash battered bottles into rafts
for raiding parties at dawn.
Matthew Bullen holds an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, England, and is the founder and head editor of Red Ogre Review, an indie press that publishes an online journal of contemporary poetry and visual art along with a poetry chapbook series. Matt has poetry published with Arsenic Lobster, Broken Antler, glassworks, Harpy Hybrid Review, Quibble Lit, Rejection Letters, The Daily Drunk (SMOL Fair Zine), tiny frights, and Underwood; creative nonfiction with National Geographic and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association; and fine art photography with Exist Otherwise, Punk Monk Magazine, and Setu Magazine. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Irina Tall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor’s degree in design.
The first personal exhibition “My soul is like a wild hawk” (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. Writes fairy tales and poems, illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorns, animals with human faces, she especially likes the image of a man – a bird – Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week. Find her on Instagram here or here.