by Roselle Farr
Traumgesicht
“What does the night know
more than me?” My fear at waking,
subcutaneous, proves it:
I am dismantled by my sleep.
The road to morning is a steep one.
Winter cicadas screeching,
out in the darkness,
while waterfalls are tumbling
from the burning sky.
Do not say We,
when you say humankind.
It is believed that Dürer
died retrospectively,
killed by his wish to see a stranded whale.
He never grasped the correlation,
nor the cause
and had to put the blame
on shifted memory,
the ghost of earlier movement.
It never was his story. Just hearsay.
The persons we become
in other people’s narrative
are trite confabulation
that might eventually destroy our lives.
“Albrecht”, his barber said, “I never got to
fix the monkey’s teeth”,
but wouldn’t live to see an ape
nor ever be a dentist.
He’d merely conjured them up.
One fallacy is asking for a judge
to understand what truth is.
Innocence and guilt
can only ever be poetic.
The painter knows
that justice is an altered dream.
Alexandra Fössinger is a German/Italian native speaker from Italy. Having lived in Germany, Sweden, and France, she is fluent in several languages; her poems, which she writes mainly in English, often express those multilingual experiences. Her work is published or forthcoming in Tears in the Fence, morphrog, Green Ink Poetry, Oyster River Pages, Eunoia Review, bind, and Mono.
Roselle Farr is a full time Business Analyst, in her spare time she is an amateur photographer, but has also started to explore the world of abstract painting. She loves being creative and a selection of her photos can be found at her Instagram page – rosellemarie_photos.