After Doris Salcedo ‘Untitled’

In the piece 'Atrabiliarios', meaning defiant, old shoes, in pairs and singles, are encased in a row of wall alcoves, behind sheets of translucent animal skin which are crudely stitched to the wall. Below on the floor are small boxes, like living caskets, made from the same animal membrane. The shoes which bear the marks of wear, all belonged to women who were 'disappeared', and were donated to the artist by victims' families. Their place here, hazily visible through the skin sheet, echoes the persistent memory for all those whose fate and whereabouts is unknown, permanently suspended between the present and the past. "Thus 'Atrabiliarios' is not only a portrait of disappearance, but a portrait of the survivors' mental condition of wracking uncertainty, longing and mourning."

no spacious shoe boxes for us
a nest skin
hangs my shoes together
from a thread

your left
your right
your tantrum stamp
drown in a pendulous teardrop

my soles peer
from a viscera chrysalis
heels scratched from the last tango
we never had

facing my scuffed toes,
tasting coconut sun cream
from Key West
where you hatched your plan

to unpick the stitches of your thin skinned prison
slip on your shoes
and sashay
through the nearest exit
the patter of
spineless feet
out of earshot,
I sat on the seafront,

watching humpbacks
breach their starless night,
flukes flailing, then pitching
back into black

my calf hide brogues
still laced in their straitjacket womb
strange fruit unripe,
suspended

as a voice shouted from
the crackling powder
of hot coals
you can dance now