“The Surrealist ” by Csilla Toldy

The Surrealist

– honouring Leonora Carrington –
 
A young lady,
treated as merchandise.
 
Society made no sense
for Leonora, and her best friend
the hyena.
 
She fell in love
with a surrealist painting
and sought out its creator
to take him, too, on a free fall.
 
Life was real in France,
married to their work of art,
(and his wife)
till the Gestapo took over the city
and Max was arrested –
 
Leonora broke down, now fully.
She fled to Spain,
But not from family and pain.
(After being sanctioned to electroshock
therapy for three years),
She ran
 
from the care of an Irish nun
to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon,
where united with Max and their entourage:
his wife, his new lover and saviour,
her own saviour ambassador, stand-in-husband –
they held wake – over the corpse of Love.
 
Travelling together on the same boat,
towards New York,
in two distinctly different directions,
she found herself in a weird future,
alive and sane, in the company
of livid creatures.
 
The Surrealist
– honouring Leonora Carrington – is © Csilla Toldy

Csilla Toldy was born in Budapest. After a long odyssey in Europe she entered the UK with a writer’s visa to work on films and ended up living in Northern Ireland in 1998. Her prose appeared in Southword, Black Mountain Review and anthology, Fortnight, The Incubator Journal, Strictly Writing and Cutalongstory. Her poetry was published online and in print literary magazines, such as Snakeskin and Poetry24, Savitri, Lagan Online, Headstuff, Visible Verse, A New Ulster and in two chapbooks published by Lapwing Belfast: Red Roots – Orange Sky and The Emigrant Woman’s Tale.

Csilla makes videopoems, available on her website: www.csillatoldy.co.uk & https://soundcloud.com/ctoldy