Eli Coyle
I guess I’ll start at the bottom. The base of a triangle
where red wine spills across white tiles. All of us
a happy accident. A piece of divine art. The framing
of lines defining what is valid in shape. Lines had to be
drawn for this picture and pictures are memories in cameras
paintbrushes and pencils. Art is a mobile phone. Before
my parents had photo albums of us kids playing
with yellow trucks on the porch twenty-miles out of town
we were running barefoot across gravel
with our blue mobile home in the frame. Robin egg-blue
rectangle of a house with white trim. Rattlesnake skins
in the yard. But I don’t recall them or the memories
of my youth. At the base rooted far far back is a faint-red
feeling of first breath. Without the lower levels
of the pyramid, there is no art. Back then my parents
read stories to us, and we read the colors of pictures
until they eventually turned to words, and then back
to pictures. The TV a moving picture. The frame
of the past is not a red triangle or a white square
but a robin egg-blue rectangle of a house
with white trim rattlesnake skins in the yard.
Eli received an MA in English with an emphasis in creative writing from California State University, Chico and lectures in their English Department. His poetry has been published in NYU’s, Caustic Frolic, the Cosumnes River Journal, and The Helix. He is a certified yoga instructor, and his writing is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy.