Lavinia Fontana’s Child of the Monkey Is Said Lost by Elena Karina Byrne

Lavinia Fontana’s Child of the Monkey is said lost

in a canopy-bearing past, her rainforest falling unheard in my bedroom but for
its laced understory leafbed layering, death’s close-call. The painter-mother’s
earthenwares are baking & breaking, branch to branch in the kitchen, as far
down as the garden’s deaf worm’s only ear. Say it. You wish you were there,
naked in that room of her painting, in the timeframe it took her to really see you,
monkey of the child, hands like moth-lit candle wax holding up your Portuguese
great-grandmother’s found letter saying she was lost, adopted from another country.
She wanted to be heard. Not home with Lavinia’s 11 other children speaking tongues
or like a tamed wolf, fur-cheeked child in plaintive pain, commissioned. Only women
relatives were allowed to be portrayed naked, lavished first & last outstanding by her
brush, away from haloed-hot sun or forest-floor-warm mulch. Say it. I would not have
come to her, a daughter handed over, altarpiece, unclothed for a King. Rather, I’d come
counterpart to Aphrodite, alone in myrtle & rose-wash with hidden tail between my legs
like tongue singing to say it in another language, dark in pearl time, waiting to be said.

Elena Karina Byrne is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Squander (Omnidawn, 2016). She will release her fourth book Phantom Limbs from Omnidawn in 2021, and a separate chapbook entitled No, Don’t from What Books Press in 2020. Elena is a freelance professor, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry.

Her publications include the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry International, BOMB, Persea Book’s: The Eloquent Poem, and is forthcoming in VOLT, and The Kyoto Journal, among others.

She has just completed a book of essays: Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire