National Poetry Month : Julia Polyck-O'Neill,

A Supine Poem for Adrian Piper

I reflect art’s heroes and elders

What does my reflection look like

Laden with the debts of collectivity

You shoulder the mattress of histories

Subtle daggers with dull edges, mostly shine

Class is cancelled in our shouted fantasies

An inscription gets reinterpreted with each read

We have the tendency to be lazy philologists

This conversation should be exquisite and unsettling

Stories nested together uneasily they’re not meant to be

Bracketed like this, chapters in logical sequence

I wear my irrationality an earned badge

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Touch the Donkey, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, 2019), and other places. She recently co-edited a special issue of Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts, “Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Arts, Media.” She has published three chapbooks, femme (2016), Everything will be taken away (2018) and poem| image | self, all with above/ground press. She currently lives in Toronto, completing her SSHRC-funded PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Brock University).