DON’T YOU WANT TO GO ANYWHERE? (For Jonas Mekas) Between rain, find him, a transcendental mirror, removed-yet-present, a memory of all memories, whispering the elation of perception while mired in lost trees. The invisible history of just one life; a handprint is the cinema; you and I thread ourselves like needles through cement. A bread, a building, a late adolescence, a fish’s fin, a triple world land, air, and sea— unreachable, nor home.
DEMOLITION BY POSTCARD “MY TEARS HAVE NO ROOTS” —Suzuki I snap kindling, crush any convex mirror I find, fumble for grandmother’s darner in these pockets, bite on quartz, then submerge it in a tub of knives; I lock my Russian- carved box. I deconstruct. Rip up pages. Eat breakfast firmly. Unhook my jaw at the table. Pretend to unlearn. Blindfold myself execution-style. I can still balance the cigarette on my lips while dissecting time, the moment you left in my mind. No matter whether I cut the red or the blue wire—we are gone already—a past frequency tuned for the undertow. Left my radio swinging on the farewell— hanging from a gnarled finger of wood.
About the Author/Artist Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (Lithuanian-Canadian-American, b.1973) is an evaporating language photographer = award-winning videopoet / poet. Her videopoems and/or visual art derived from her videopoems have placed in international video poetry festivals or have been featured at: MOCA Toronto (as part of Jeffrey Gibson's public installation/archive, stemming from the exhibit I AM YOUR RELATIVE; Boston Cyberarts Gallery; movingpoems.com; Mutable Sound; the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada); the Vienna Poetry Film Festival; the International Video Poetry Festival (Greece); Artlitlab's Midwest Video Poetry Festival (US); the Ontario College of Art & Design University's exhibit, "Private Lives"; Festival Fotogenia (Mexico City); the Newlyn Film Festival (UK); and the Cadence Video Poetry Film Festival (US). Her 2015-2019 collection of videopoems, based upon her chapbook, White Stockings, was a collaboration with visual artist, Tess Cortes, and were screened at the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) conference at Stanford University (2018), the Ready Freddy Film Festival (2019), Chicago Filmmakers (2019), and for a new member reading of the League of Canadian Poets (2022).
