Our hands, chain linked fences,
Your arm, my support,
Your height, my shadow.
It was provocatively mundane.
Mall art galleries, free of pretension,
Trying to sell you, public art, free art,
Passing by, art,
Instill a sense of, something,
That you couldn’t put your finger on it,
Something’s, off,
One wrong shade somewhere, continuously painted over.
I couldn’t hear it.
Couldn’t hear our clocks slowly ticking. Out of sync
with time, and our hands, long
short, thin, slowly
moved, just
A little bit faster,
The lights grew brighter,
The crowds came, dirty
hands all wanted to touch
this public art.
This poem “Public Art” originally appeared in Asian Canadian Critique Beyond the Nation. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 227 (Winter 2015): 55.
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