What is Morning?
By Trina Burke

—after Antonin Stibůrek’s Girls’ War

At its center
the future is birth
and mechanics.
The art guard—
small, elderly, female—
contemplates the art.
Egg shells voided of cargo
applied painstakingly
to canvas,
and where the yolks?
The artist obviously
thought enough of the cartons
to include them
in his multimedia
phantasmagoria of womb-tit
futurism. Yes,
lipstick is phallic.
Yes, the artist did well
to include the black canvas
for eye-rest by the hue-light
of a made-up moon.
No, she thinks, leaning back
with the creaking disapproval
of a folding chair,
I will not love an art
that wastes eggs.

As if lipstick
were a weapon
to be blunted
in enemy skin—
an explosion of cadmium
and cosmetics-grade petroleum
to melt bodies and minds
with the promise of arousal. That
we should need the façade
is a signal—
we are losing.
At the gallery on the canal
A wooden figure has a twat
of bark and a hat of tit
and arms of tits
and she stands on boots
of tits. But where
is her rifle?

The skies are full
of dawn-brought
satellites whose
craggy surfaces
catch as much as reflect
the light of daybreak.
A pragmatic host
of worker soldiers
drink to grease the gears,
to enter the fray combative.
Their hybrid metal-flesh
glimmers, awash
with an alien glow,
the light of the swell
of a young breast. It is not enough
to say merely that the artist
was frustrated
or to rule that morning’s
highest incarnation
comes in the form of aubade.

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