Elena Karina Byrne

The sound of stars crumbling without any malice/ In a corner of the universe…

–Thomas James

There’s no conclusion

to what one feels: I wanted to marry an absence, my one brother

said, cotton-mouthed with the roiling confusion of surf and its

white-water time-rush, fitted for despair. Not the family theater of 

red-winged boats pulling at this paper continent ahead of us. Not

the thousands of miles of sleep like the ocean’s inexhaustible will, her

unfailing pull from shore…hook, line, and sinker, I mourned all the King’s 

horses and all their men galloping away with you. Nothing coaxed 

passed remorse, nothing but that heel of anger, the heroin head to its slip 

of dirty drink water. After all, you had gone from me again, multiplied 

yourself by morning, larger in this open place so that we might inherit 

a new size, second chance. Who else would knock their head on the next 

underwater prison door, again, asking me to enter? Lovely hand of fate 

in the glove. Lovely octopus-bled ink stain we’re made of. I want to say 

I’m sorry about the past. The world once made this missing piece of logic 

from the sea’s crushed salt caravan, constantly moving its reflected light, 

glinting like an overlap of fish scales taken from the full moon’s 

same decaying face. 


The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.

–Joseph Brodsky

Take the joy ride for example. 

                   In language isolate, he told his parents he was 

going to study Mathematics with another friend. But instead, he took flight’s 

French waterway-hallucination on an Eyak run with two other numeric-American 

boys and a drunken Russian girl in a Japanese sports car, each South American rabbit 

heart taken out into a Central African crow’s uncut field as their afternoon Chinese 

spaceship took the Egyptian pyramids’ calculations out of order, disobeyed the sum 

total speed of folk spirits, civilization, and science of gravity, and there and then

all Vietnam-veered across the cement medium divide, headlong-going the oleander-

wrong way, in a German full-on Alaskan blizzard of changing traffic lights and bad 

years, leaving their thousand Ukraine-hour promontory behind for a body-from-body 

fight, floorless Gaelic flitch conversation with

Death who obeys no one but himself.


Elena Karina Byrne is an advisory editor for Anacapa Review, as well as a former Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards judge. She works as a freelance editor and professor, Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient, Elena’s five poetry collections include If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021). Currently, Elena is writing screenplays while completing her collection of essays entitled Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, and Desire.