BY FEATURED WRITER: RYLEIGH WANN

Ryleigh Wann, *Mother on Repeat*, mixed media, 2022. Courtesy of Ryleigh Wann, Ross Page, Grace Lamay.

Aftermath of Obliteration

of Eternity

RYLEIGH WANN | MAY 2022 | ISSUE 16

After an installation of the same name by Yayoi Kusama, 2009

A glass of bourbon and two cigarettes deep, fled from a hurricane in the Blue Ridge after a few short weeks in my graduate program, with people I was just beginning to know, someone asked which moment of all our moments we would want to relive. One girl said her wedding day. Someone else mentioned their time living abroad, climbing mountains. I pondered, stuttering around my newly drunken friends. When I visited Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” exhibit at The Cleveland Museum of Art. A boyfriend had secured tickets for this sold-out gallery but couldn’t come. I wanted to bring someone who appreciated the arts, who encouraged me with a can of paint and a brush as a kid, whose relationship I had been trying to mend for years. A week before the exhibit, I stood above my booze-soaked mother as she sobbed, body heaving like a cat, while her hands, shawled in arthritis, held mine. I could see pain in her eyes and that old cliché waved to me, like she would from a buoy in Lake Erie when I was a kid, scared, watching from the shore. She never wanted me to live with fear, like the fear she witnessed firsthand. An alcoholic farmer for a father. An early pregnancy, an elopement. In an honest voice, she told me she loved me—one of her many confessions disguised as apologies, repeated during nights like this that blur together. I tried leading her to bed, peeling off her jeans through fits of quick anger and the kind of surrender that felt like both of us meant it. Yayoi Kusama’s installations include mirrors against mirrors—vastness of light unveiling before you for infinity. The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away displayed blues and silvers like a galaxy, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity mirrored lights identical to the gold ring my mother and I both have around our iris. I wish I could go back, ignore my irritation with my mother’s request that I take a photo of her in each mirrored room, a room you could only stand in for 10 seconds. I was naïve. If I could, I would return, hold that moment of her pure joy, her smile like an estranged cousin I had not seen in a long, long time. That smile that somehow felt absent during my adolescence, begging her to stay home with me, if only to watch “The Wizard of Oz” in the basement while she blew cigarette smoke, legs hunched to her chest in the pleather loveseat, talking on the cordless phone. I would relive this moment because she was sober all day (aside from the one beer with breakfast). She was excited, excited for the art, for the wonder it possessed. Excited to be there, in a room that will never end, with me.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) earned her MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. She is the music editor for Flypaper Lit and is the founder and organizer of The Swampera Room Reading Series, a project in Wilmington, NC that supports local writers to share their work with an audience and engage with creative writing. She currently lives in North Carolina by way of the Midwest. Her writing has appeared in Longleaf Review, Rejection Letters, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Sundress, and elsewhere.