Elana Wolff

Bio: Elana Wolff is a Toronto-based writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, a literary editor and designer and instructor of social art courses. Her poems and creative nonfiction pieces have been published widely in Canada and internationally, most recently in Taddle Creek Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, Riddle Fence, Eclectica, GRIFFEL, Wanderlust Review,
and Eunoia Review. Her newest collection of poems is Swoon (Guernica Editions, 2020).

Black Bird-Sculpture

silkscreen monoprint
Inky, well-made, sinewy thin. The armature

discloses both the structure of a perfect bird
& mount for what is missing.

S/he stands, it seems, in order to support trans-

figuration: coming through the rapture
of the background: red & yellow, blue.

Latency a radiance of fundamental color.

The bird must be aware of its emergence
out of wire lines:

Here the caw of incarnating: 1 2 1 2 1 2 1

This poem was inspired by Beryl Goering's painting, Crow Blues.

Acrylic Pigeon

Tawny feathers, bluish beak, an eye
like a loose lorgnette.
He could, the artist reckons, be a parrot: It’s her painting.
To me, however, text in the foreground
indicates a pigeon: an urban bird, a carrier,
and this his dark epistle.
Words encoded, as in poems.

Perhaps the swath of textured red
—masking half the canvas—
is a transmutation of blood.
Touch it
and be carried back to the blow:
the leaking scene, the fire freed, a silent conflagration.
After-ache encrypted in inchoate pidgin script.

This poem was inspired by Wendy Weaver's painting, Is It A Parrot?
Prime & Shiny

A cardinal descends The mate arrives
on prey with to stake her
wings of filmy claim. He waves
sequined sun, he her off—a
rips the glitter, flick of his
severs the head— tail. She flutters
prime & shiny, up to a
big-eyed head—snaps sprinkler head and
the torso in lingers ... Think of
half. Beak the him as magical,
perfect truncheon. He the garden greening,
hacks the exoskeleton, all etheric—shades
it resists like & veils of
a living thing. primavera, dragonfly consumed
And we—you’ve to a few
joined me at hard shards. He
the window—gawk. lifts the last
We’ve dreamt of and brings it
food—soft comfort to the missus
dishes: kitcheree & in a kiss—
syllabub. Nothing tough hov’ring like a
as dragonfly in-death. hummingbird above her—

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