The voice that walks the reader through Alisha Dietzman’s “Museum(s)” presents paintings by Vermeer equally alongside building fixtures, fire alarms, errant thoughts, and odd phrases from caption boxes. Like the photomontages of Soviet propagandist Gustavs Klucis that it cites, the poem queries the possibilities of decontextualization by cropping and juxtaposing disparate events and objects until they touch one another differently. “Museum(s)” reframes the contents of post-Soviet historical archives (and personal, contemporary ones) as a tactic for measuring a history that had been personally and politically repressed. Dietzman’s accumulation of description never quite resolves what happens off-frame, but builds out an unsettling halo of what might have been erased: considering the body implied by the empty dress, the reasons one might practice a scream, or—harkening back to Klucis’s own eventual disappearance and execution—how consent might be abstracted and forced in front of a firing squad. The poem stages an ambivalent ars poetica for aesthetic distancing and the white space that surrounds a fragment or through which an “actual lilac” might grow. —The Editors and the Poetry Staff
Museum(s)
Did you not pour me out like milk?
Gustavs Klucis’ lithe cut outs.
Bayonet. Ruby.
Hollow-bodied woman in the photograph bruised canister.
Directions in case and little red
fire alarms.
Once I screamed at you to know I am capable of screaming
when called upon. That in urgent situations, I might could.
Anyway nobody reads history anymore.
A hogtied horse.
Are you interested in violence or are you bored?
Both yeses, immoral.
I have heard that even with a gun to your head,
your consent is yours.
Folk skirt, floating. No legs. No waist.
Maybe 30 dresses, I can’t count, in found-florals,
without comment.
The marble heads of dozens in state.
Man eating pearls, possibly.
Sacrificial vertebrae. Ration.
A single Vermeer.
Klucis, again, his long-armed, beautiful Lenin.
Gustavs Klucis is shot by the NKVD in winter,
the sign says. I think about this for days. That nothing saves some of us.
More paintings: abstract hydrangeas
in front of a house, burning.
In the video installation, a woman: the clients like all cavities.
Print of stacked cabbages,
from a distance.
A wet pane of glass and an actual lilac
growing back through the window.