Brian Clifton

The Dybbuk


The ear and the mouth move
in sync. The voice won’t come

if the tongue is wrong.
First of all, the soft becomes

                           solid, possessing,
                           possessed, wrapped

in the throat’s moist shawl.
The more reckless the talk

the further the speaker from their body— 

as if a knife severed the two
and feathered the flesh. Oil

                             would encase it.
                             And fire. Fire if it felt

like it. It would do it. It would
show there were always two— 

one mouth pressed to another’s
ear. It’s like nothing

                           is inside. But there is.

To Bury Everything


The residency had ended. Most of the artists were gone. Because of an unforeseen delay, I was stuck there. I didn’t mind. I wandered the half-emptied and darkened galleries—the lights were on timers. But one stray beam can give the brain enough. Paintings turn to mirrors. Every piled installation becomes a crouching figure, and every figure comes alive—glittering surfaces like the unseeing eyes of the dead. One artist spent the week remaking Louise Bourgeois’ Arch of Hysteria from stuffed pantyhose. We spent a long time discussing the original and their multiple homages to it. They said pantyhose was the ideal material—feminine but also meant to hide the feminine. The original was polished bronze. Wherever it was displayed, it lit the room with the light it reflected. When I first saw it, I stared at its exaggerated bend, how my reflection distorted around the folds of fingers, feet, the protruding pelvis. Hard and heavy, it did not move on its steel cable. These arches made the opposite gesture: soft, pliable, ghostly. Lifting them was like lifting the elderly, those near death. Once I was charged with moving my mother from her bed to her wheelchair. I remember how little it took to scoot her over the edge. During the residency, I worked in unfired clay. I made elaborate urns. I left them outside for the rain and dew to digest before hauling them back in to display as collapsed vessels, failed receptacles for the failed body. Earth to earth. Unlike the original, the arches did not gleam. Holding one by its thread, the artist believed the arc it made was from the wear they put into the pantyhose. This is how I would bend, they said, if I were suspended. They took my hand and traced the sculpture’s limp parabola. Too much touch and it twirled on its string. They stuffed it taut with cotton and cash. Everywhere bulged: the ends, the joints, the crotch. Strange how money can ghost the body, how it turns it to dirt and ash. I looked at the arches so much I felt I knew their every inch. My mother died years ago. Now when I thought of her, she was a cut-out and moved like a cut-out, floating stiffly through memories like some flat ache longing approximates. I remembered our time together when I walked through the galleries—me and this artist. We installed our work in the same small room. I stood in the doorway. The lights from the parking lot filtered through the hall’s windows. They cast long, flat rivers of grey. In the dark, the room looked empty. I shifted side to side, up and down, trying to find an angle that would hint at the many arches in the room and the many urns behind them. I wanted to see them one last time. I reached into the dark and felt along the wall. Thinking I found the switch, I pulled down. After the alarm, the sprinklers released. The soft bends of the arches sharpened as their limbs grew heavy with water. Some snapped their threads and splatted on the floor. Behind them, my urns were undone. Running down the pedestals, they covered the limp bodies in mud while the alarms wailed through their repeated burial.

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​Brian Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have worked in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.