Gifts, poetry written by Annie Lure at Spillwords.com
Aleksei Sundukov (Prolonged and Undiminished Applause)

Gifts

Gifts

written by: Annie Lure

 

The masses proffer their brains as if wreaths to Stalin.
Stalin hoards their brains the way a schoolboy hoards candy.
Poor Stalin’s got no face. The sun burned it off. The rain washed it out. A hoarded brain munched it.
His devotees peel their faces and paste them where his should be.
Stalin sieves smiles onto the masses like an industrious mother.
But the brainy few eschew the smiles. Pray tell, dear leader, isn’t your ‘production mode’ a capitalist investment?
Stalin gazes at his gilded mirror the way Yahweh gazed at the face of the antediluvian Earth: Let there be no thinking man.
Stalin whisks the brains with a flick of his finger. But some brains adhere to their skulls.
Stalin lobotomizes the brains. The palms sew their lifelines into his placard sticks.
Dear citizens, we have converted the counterrevolutionaries.
The masses strike their hands, flint with steel, igniting a prolonged and undiminished applause.
The artist labors underground, high on turpentine. His brush incantates his hand. It wards off Stalin’s commissions for an idol and an idyll.
The confiscated brains of his countrymen ring the bell of his head. He limns a box about his effaced, brainless people.
His painting rides his vigor. It blooms on the wall of Zimmerli Art Museum.
The bloody applause clangs my brain.

Annie Lure

Annie Lure

Annie Lure is a Rutgers alumnus of Global Humanities, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing. She has had poems published in Slipstream Issue 36 (print), Odyssey: Mediterranean Poetry, and Cider Press Review. She has worked as a language informant at University of Delaware, editor of private clients' monographs, arts and culture reporter for New Brunswick Today, and publisher for Best Version Media. She enjoys custom-made clothing, museums, and traveling.
Annie Lure

Latest posts by Annie Lure (see all)