Jack Bordnick’s sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones — aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves.
The Candle That Burns Twice as Bright Burns Half as Long
The heavy, heady
mixture of marijuana,
tobacco and clove
cigarette smoke hanging like
a secret meeting
of friendly ghosts in the dank
basement air beneath
the ancient hard wood floorboards
of Prospero’s Book-
store (on the north-west corner
of 39th and
Bell in KC / MO), the
peach-colored streetlight
outside, a flurry of june
bugs and moths, like so
many communication
and spy satellites
forever circling, round and
round it, each in their
own distinctive and manic
trajectory, and
the stars above and beyond
them, slowly burning
their way, so very, very
brightly, through the black
outer shell of the night sky
(as they do both night
and day, by the way, whether
we can see them or
not), until that time when they
eventually,
inevitably consume
us, as well, or, just
fade away into the dark
void of absolute zero.
Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, six screenplays, and a few short stories. He is an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review, and other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “And When There Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand” (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey). He lives in Kansas City, MO, and in the Ozarks.
