The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah

---

ekphrastic under a bombed-out sky

“If you cut out a rectangle of perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue
frame, place it face up on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.”
                                            — Victoria Chang in “Grief—as I knew it, died many times”

I can’t abide happy art, not when the air
hanging over my people is smoke-dusted,
bomb-clouded, gray with phosphorus
& miasmic with rot. Not when the weather
is sunny with a chance of bullets, partly
bloody, & cool with a wind chill of dead.
Not when the DSM has no diagnosis
for PTSD with no P because there’s no post,
so the letters pile up like bodies in the street.

Blue sky grief is a different breed: natural causes
& old age; diseases acquired from a life lived,
if not lived well. Our sky grief is a night ablaze
with rockets, eardrums throbbing, windows
rattling, & tent flaps clapping from the blast.

I buy an abstract painting during the genocide
so I can project my grief onto the canvas.
One day the triangle of red is blood; another,
it’s a wedge of ambulance. One day it’s a purple
smudge of fig; another, a deep bruise. One day
the chartreuse is a festering wound; another,
the sick of sick, but there’s no poetic way
to say vomit. Frameless, uncontainable.

If I place my abstract on the floor of what’s left
of a looted museum with a hole to the sky
where the ceiling once was, I doubt
the warplanes would even notice—
& because they chose not to see, they’ll claim
it must never have been there at all.

---