SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Seven
ALISON DUNHILL
Dear Bone
Dear Bone-Branch, you are bleached, more by wind
than sun. You are bleached, you are branch-
become-bone. Dismembered limblet of unmanaged
tree under air-ripped clouds on a small beach
by a huge sea. Lying. Branch-become-bone,
we remember the dinosaurs in their
last lived-in land. Alone beneath craters
and peaks. White brontosaurus bone alone,
until I take you home six thousand miles,
tissue-wrapped inside a harmonica box,
to lie on my teak-stained fluted mantelpiece.
The fire roars and shoots red this long winter.
Your dry Henry Moore figure
reclines high on the polished surface.
End
My heart hangs heavy.
The angels have guns.
They crouch behind the mound of grass
below the dark pink sky.
I long for wind to blow.
I have clay dust on my shoes and see behind the broken fence a pine tree
still growing
in considerable beauty.
Standing as straight, I quiver,
but hold my balance,
clamping in a vice the emotions I retain.
The angels are nuns now, out from the mound.
Their eyes pin me with a Catholic heaven's rapture;
pointing their guns, they'll not fail.
I sway,
I'm giddy with vomit rising stale.
The sound comes, the bullet targets,
its pain a relief.
That hurts less, is expected.
My blood congeals into wormcasts in a few days.
Alison Dunhill lives in Norfolk, England. She is a visual artist and an art historian with an MA & an MPhil. She has published a collection titled Gig Soup Scoop (Transgravity Advertiser, London, 1972). She was an Arvon mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe magazine.
