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What Ed Bennett wrote:
There is a deep sensuality in these poems, sometimes apparent, sometimes below the surface
in an almost Freudian current. "Master and Servant: Mask" is a soliloquy from a submissive
lover showing the inverted world of their love where it is the submissive demanding from
their Dominant:

Master & Servant: Mask
by Elena Karina Byrne
                     Oh! How foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another.
                            ‐Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, 1295

Oh! More than me, twice, I am.
Twofold, of two minds.
What will you see?
I am inside the mask made of blue corn husks.
Where else
can I begin in such significance, my own worn element?

Bend the need to demand; rust the hours.
Acquiesce our duplicate pleasure,‐corruptible
as incorrigible but this is only

       the appearance of confinement, insolent and lacquered.
What we have wanted from each other
all along: an inseparable, same face.
Our vanity is irrational.

Wake me. Tell me what to do with myself in the dark.
Our life is made of words. The world obeys
no apology. Here

I demand your full attention
and a tied locket of your hair.

Your being,       my nothing.


Originally Appeared in Agenda Magazine, UK
from MASQUE, Tupelo Press, 2007



Ed's full review can be viewed here:

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/August2011/Masque.html

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