Alexander Calder’s Circus
by Jean Kane
Art: “Moon Rise”
By Najib Joe Hakim
dances the way only wires can
bobbing in the oxygen of
trapeze artists, on the bend
of musclemen and even
elegant clowns. I know the flesh
dance, opposite weights, contrapposto step
up and sway down. I see the arc
tips and swans back up in
the congregation of choir winds. I want to
join the play. Outline for me the way
to dangle bits still fly up
without muscle. I love his fingers and want to
give them another visitation. The horse
needs a rider. The lion
doesn’t threaten though his jaws widen.
Lucia Joyce (1907-82), the daughter of James Joyce, participated in the artistic milieu of Paris in the 1920s. She pursued a vocation in modern dance. Alexander Calder, who staged miniature circuses, was one of her amours.
Jean Kane’s creative work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction online, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Courtship of Winds, Indiana Review, 3:AM, Hotel Amerika, Euphony Journal, Fogged Clarity, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The MacGuffin, Ignatian Literary Magazine, [Volume I: Brooklyn], Nonconformist Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Pine Hills Review, Posit Journal, Rue Scribe, Slab, Word For/Word, Doubly Mad, Isele, and the Ginosko Review. Her book of poems, Make Me, was published by Otis Nebula in 2014. She received the Otis Nebula First Book Award, and was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.
She has also published a monograph on Joyce and Rushdie, Conspicuous Bodies (Ohio State University Press 2014) She is a professor of English and women, feminist, and queer studies at Vassar College in the US.