"miro at buckingham"

"basquiat at ibiza"

Natalie Hanna

Natalie Hanna (she/her) is a queer, disabled lawyer of Middle-Eastern descent who works with low income populations. She is author of 12 chapbooks, most recently a collaboration with Liam Burke, machine dreams (Collusion Books, 2021). Between 2016-2018, she was Administrative Director of the Sawdust Reading Series and served on the board of ARC. Her poem “light conversation” received an Honourable Mention in Arc‘s 2019 Diana Brebner Prize, and her work been published in Canada and the US. She runs battleaxe press (small press poetry) and lives in Nepean, Ontario, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land.

“At a virtual TREE Reading Series event in early 2020, I heard Andy Verboom read his poem “The Appendectomy of Kenpachiro Satsuma,” which appears in his KFB chapbook DBL. Two lines in and I was laughing so hard at the absurdity I couldn’t breathe. The poem commences, “Even Hieronymus Bosch at Coachella / couldn’t have drafted this rubberneck hydra / swamping the soundstage.” I started writing a small collection of poems called “Hieronymus Bosch at Coachella,” putting other artists in absurd positions. These two poems are about artists who have changed how we think about space and state: Joan Miro (particularly Woman Encircled by the Flight of A Bird, 1941) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (particularly Untitled, 1982) .”

miro at buckingham
runs his hands across the smooth
painted plaster
all these white canvasses and
all these god damned corgis
pulls an inkwell and pen from his pocket
and traces the path of an erstwhile cat
from drawing-room to great-
crawling between the legs of occasional tables
sideboards
where might a cat be confined in a castle
(without camouflage) without rococo cover
and spins himself in circuits
later going in to fill the spaces
where inky lassos lie in wait
to trap a hapless paw
with the shades of curiosity
of pursuit, and ennui

basquiat at ibiza
sits in an alcove, rolling
the end of his cigarette
thinks maybe it was a mistake
to come, the fact of the place
so completely impossible

to arrive incognito and remain so
w/the little flocks of famously rich
erasing their histories
who know not where to put
the sorrow of wealth

pinioned like the vitruvian man
empty from hairline
to the bottom of the chin
of the music of life
this is not, he thinks
how you draw a head