A Poem by Sarah Corbett

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after Marina Abramović

I set burning
a ring of twelve stars
laid in the grass like hands,
at the centre

my avatar in old clothes.
This is art, not death.
Who will see it,
in these days

of singularity?
A drone sparks alarm
in a distant tower
and a startling flower

opens in a blue
interior where lit faces
flicker and stare,
dream-zone

of our commensurate
age. From the bedroom
window I film
through my phone.

Petroleum fumes
communicate a hiss
like the letting of gas
from a stove,

at the core fake
head, arms, legs,
the puffed-out torso,
bubble and singe.

I am at once alive
and dead, down
there in the grass,
and leaning too far

over the windowsill,
heat on my face,
the ends of my
hair curling.

The stars turn
to black threads,
then streamers,
a calligraphy,

like bird flight,
and the white
morning burns
to a black noon

where constellations
look down,
dispassionate,
from their houses.

Sarah Corbett has published five collections of poetry, including the verse novel And She Was, (Pavilion Poetry, 2015) and A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry, 2018). Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Poetry prizes, and widely translated and anthologised. A new collection is forthcoming from Pavilion Poetry in 2024. In 2022 Sarah produced and directed the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival, and co-edited After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University and lives in Hebden Bridge.