SurVision Magazine

A Dada Love Song


What you say is just about the thing you want to say
like rubies in your hair I kiss whatever.
Come back until it is light.
When I dream, I take long steps
because the vessel is aching and tilted.
Let's go back over it, okay?
Waiting for one more stone to rise.

Spit it out –
     the rain of tongue,
     the mist of teeth,
     the moon of voice.

(Strong sense of smell.)
Spit like wildfire spits the night.

First things first –
listen, listen until you hear more
and another tide falls –
or is it the dream again –
the one about dusk and the mirror,
mirror and dusk?
Which is which?

I am a leaf falling in the
wrong direction,
turning around up the down staircase.





Dada Digesting


Stop this digesting.
Turn down the air conditioner.
No one is too young to sound like a sewer.
(Melted black rats.)

A blister in my mouth
From the hot potato canoe.

Free food.
Mushrooms.

The waitress lent me a strobe light.





Dada Flag


Fallen plants. Electric pigeons.
Worms – we waded backwards.

Swing bed
Croon face.

Whisper wasted shaking in the mud.
Survive like bones of infinity.
Piss off.
Suffer like Christ man.

Hell shoots.

O no state finding
injured flowers.

(Leather and radishes.)
Six feet under
but thousands of feet up.

Man like an apple core,
dead on the hill,
rotting Nicaraguan disembodied.

Political darkness
wading in the hatred.

Greek mortal boots,
devils grab your ankles.
(Sway themselves.)

Kings of the road-blocked road.
Others howl like LOVE.

So dangerous president,
vote for dirt –
you will always be standing upon earth,
molten.

Breakdown.
Assassination.

O Folk.
Women wave breast like flags
of patriotic puppets.
The government is wading.

My God's gonna take care of all sides.





Elin O'Hara Slavick is a Professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Slavick has exhibited her work internationally, and her work is held in many collections, including The Library of Congress, Deutsche Bank, URDLA, The National Library of France, The Art Institute of Chicago, and as a promised gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Slavick is the author of two monographs, Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography with a foreword by Howard Zinn, and After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France and Japan. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Images Magazine, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Len/scratch, BurnAway, Asia-Pacific Journal, Critical Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Critical Spatial Practice, Photo-Eye, and Actuphoto: Actualite Photographique, among other publications. She has received many grants, awards and fellowships for her work, teaching and activism.