Francine Elena’s poems have been published in The Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt), Clinic, 3AM Magazine and Poems in Which. Her chapbook of three tiny stories, Christmas Lantern, was recently published by 3AM Press.
She has written for travel anthology Par Avion (3AM Press) and Art Wednesday. She grew up in England, Portugal and Scotland and now lives in London.
My brain is a folded device
I mainly use
to talk through the day
without vocal cords
wirelessly bound
and when the line is faulty
I draft thoughts
to send on a dark English road
or something garbled from my childhood bedroom
and your reply is drunken too
you might speak from a Bosnian balcony
or a Scottish library
while I eat bake rolls and data on the Aegean
a sandwich in a fluorescent office
and you are on a purple mountain that
looks like a screensaver
these days are strung with itinerant syntax
punctuation miming synapse graphics
interchange rapid impulse
an infinite electric knot
to be read again
Francine, where did you grow up?
Was it London, like Irina Valcheva
Kenta Yoshida and 36 other friends?
Or Hong Kong,
like Daniel Matheka
Mariana Ribeiro
and one other friend?
Or Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
a place of education,
Francine (is that really your surname?)
with your friend Sophie Johnson?
You are only 80% complete.
Come on now.
Did you grow up in ‘other hometown’
or ‘I don’t have a hometown’?
‘I don’t have a hometown’?
Is that the one?
Your browsing history likes to think so.
If you ignore us,
these bright particles of light,
the question will be asked again,
the next time you are here.
The question is always here, Francine.
Its zeal is so vehement
it is an encouragement to lie.
