PRIME NUMBER MAGAZINE, ISSUE 137, JUL – SEP 2018

2018 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry

Guernica Triptych

The triptych begins as news sweeps from Spain to France
Picasso in Paris
using every shade from the pewter of ashes

a slate of steel
to the white of light  hands everywhere  swollen fingers reaching
the platinum of pain

for mother   an absent God   the artist’s holy trinities fill
this massive work
a dove of peace  a twisting horse  a bull  his two eyes

staring straight at us
and mouth inches above a mother’s mouth torn open
with cries to heaven

breasts hanging over the dead infant  one woman crawls
falling into flames
burning above a dismembered soldier  his hand around

the broken sword
all the broken bits and pieces  of horse  bits and pieces
of market place

where the German Luftwaffe trapped shoppers
people finished off
rushing to collect the wounded   a beautifully executed

erasure of the ancient Basque town
birthday present for Hitler from Göring  their own Spanish
Gernika

experiment the painter made his own by adding
a fourth woman
Conchita  thrusting forth a lamp as she exhales light

Picasso’s long dead sister
he bargained with God but couldn’t save
Let her live and I will not paint again

Diana Pinckney’s work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Arroyo, RHINO, Cave Wall, The Pedestal Magazine, Nine Mile Magazine, North Carolina Literary Review and many journals and anthologies. She has led workshops for the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Charlotte Writer’s Club, the South Carolina Writer’s Network and Charlotte Literary Center for the Arts. Author of five collections of poetry, including Green Daughters (2011) and The Beast and The Innocent (2015), Pinckney is the winner of The 2010 EKPHRASIS Magazine Prize and Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Poetry Prize, among other awards.