red canvas

Bingerville, Cote d’Ivoire

 

“I was painting and blood spattered onto my canvas. A bullet had grazed a woman who was running with her child. I left the wound to say ‘never again.’”                     

      ~ Yubah Sanogo, about the 2010-2011 post-electoral crisis

I see red / in the forecast / a crimson dye spreading

across the sky / punctured by gunfire 

& the hiss of smoke

 

I see a wound in the sky / rubricating the clouds 

as the bazaar of war / saturates

my city red

 

I see the entrails / of dead chickens auguring

men / wet with sweat / & women

flesh drenched red

 

I see the penumbra / of carrion beetles underfoot

as they swim / toward the pulp 

of red bodies

 

I see fear tunnel / into faces / through the round caves 

of eyes / the reckless mouths 

the red garb of the body

 

I see the bedlam of a red city / its burning cutbanks 

its bloody corona / & the red clamour 

of the rooster / on the roof

 

I see blue men / running / with white masks 

bearing red bodies / in black tarps

 

I cannot unsee / these colours

this timbre of red / this rhythm of light         

 

the canvas speaks

                            my paintbrush writes