Catherine McGuire

For the 21st Century: Elegy on Six Monitors

Grainy pixels coalesce and flow.
En-framed: ten feet of hall, immortalized
in Dada brilliance, endless, empty, now
saved to disk. Another screen espies
grayscale daisies, chessboard of weeds;
squad of eight horsepower pawns checked,
rusting door locks, relict of keys.
A third scans sky like an oily wreck:
slimy clouds roil and snake a sun
catacombed perpetually behind steel ranks—
towers fractaled; cracks that blossom
at the wind’s insistence. A fourth is blank.
A fifth is fuzz. The last screen’s frozen and
shows lobes of smoke, door handle, one hand.