Metropolitan Rainbows
for Richard Kenney
1. Singing odes to an arrow-shaped cloud. Pow Wow intertribals. Circles.
2. A woman frowns in a black and white picture. A rainbow is reflected in the glass case.
3. On the backs of eyelids, rainbows are the wings of insomniac nights. A thousand petals bloom, when, crying, I close my eyes.
4. A girl. A bus. A rainbow painted on her cheek. Outside, the rain. The colors have begun to run.
5. A rainbow plays peek-a-boo behind container cranes. Rainbow. Red. Rainbow. Red. Rainbow. Red. When the rainbow fades, a boy cries.
6. Moody rainbows appear on the street, eye-shaped and blinking. We are careful not to step on them.
7. Rainbows pour through the pores of our interurban, immigrant sky at any given moment.
8. "Go outside! A rainbow is rising from the roof of your house!" We stay on the phone. We are seeing different colors.
9. A series of shadows of auras.
10. This rainbow stretches over miles of landfill. A girl sighs, "I wish I were a rainbow."
11. Seagulls carry the colors of ocean and watery sky.
12. A black and white rainbow hangs over the Blue Guitarist. Sunlight pours into the room.
13. Someone speaks of creation under a hat. Arms gesture wildly. Boys stretch before a baseball. Like colors and a pot of gold. It is, perhaps, raining.
14. The concrete is cluttered with litter and rainbows.
15. They pour from the mouth of the crow who's watching from a telephone wire! It's got a message.
16. This silver city falls upon me like a rainbow.
Deniz Perin
Deniz Perin, raised
in Los Angeles, blew north to Seattle in 1994. In 1999, she blew west to
Taiwan and then India, where she lived and worked, until she blew further
west to Istanbul. Nowadays, she gazes at Asia from the window of her apartment!
Her works have been published in Art Access, Synapse,
and Bricolage. She self-published a book of prose/poetry about
Taiwan, Crooked Terraces.