SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fifteen
MARTINE BELLEN
List of Things That Might Lead to Selective Mutism (found tucked in a mirror of a train's bathroom)
1. Spaceships to transport us onto the forked path of totality
2. Drunken specters brawling with gangstas
3. Rummaging through a girl ghost's diary, revealing she's you, that she's us
4. West Indian duppy hiding in closets, in corners of the heart, in plastic containers
8. Scratchy toilet paper
5. Chasing the dream of a dreamhouse folded into an origami suitcase
7. Gambling on a salesman with one bean to his name that will grow into a home with fee, fau,
fum stomping titans
6. A radioactive bomb blowing us up onto an island of bonding gases
9. Mother asleep for days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes, bounding through our lives
10. Dishes piled high in the sink, igneous rocks stacked at the end of the bed
No one has heard my voice yet. It's somewhere deep in my chest of drawers beneath the software and stuffed monsters. It's hardest at school when everyone expects sounds to leave your mouth...
The Last Year
It was the Lunar Year of Dragon
The Solar Year of face and ice cream
The Biologic Year of Depends
It was the Year After Breath
The year after mother left
When the family gathered to shape
Cel frames spliced together for ghosts' yearly film festival
That year's theme: de-creation
How one's system gyrates
Within the Dark Universe
96% obscured
The eye asleep
With one oyster open
Ghosts in attendance
Peeking through celluloid x-rays
It was the year after mom mowed the lawn,
Moaned, and we were no longer allowed her.
Today I wear only mother's socks and toes, hands and wrists.
They look at me and wonder why
They aren't attached to Sheila Bellen,
My fabricator.
Martine Bellen lives in New York City. Her ten collections of poetry include The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press), Ghosts! (Spuyten Duyvil), and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon; a winner of the National Poetry Award). Her tenth collection, An Anatomy of Curiosity, has been published by MadHat Press in 2023.
