This belongs to everyone so enjoy the view by Aurelie Crisetig
Gutterflower
When the maple leaves
begin to crisp and fall
from one height to another—
settling in second-story gutters—
they form a stratum of rot,
a slow-fusing, nutrient-rich base.
By spring, the goldfinches come.
They perch and sing—trilling, wheezing—
then shed their delicate offerings:
zinnia seeds,
slipped loose from the gut.
Without intent,
they become gardeners.
From the rot, a sprout.
From the sprout, a stalk—
green spine pressing toward the gutter’s lip,
then out into weather and wind.
Then comes a note of jazz,
a disco ball where each shard of glass
is dyed red, pink, or purple.
From the driveway below,
the gutter is a gutter—
a manmade canal
lifted twenty feet into the air
by screws and human hands.
But the zinnia is tucked
high in its home,
like candy hidden
from the reach of greedy children—
admired the way we admire
an atom,
or a quark:
unseen,
but understood
if only in concept or in theory.
About the author:
Sean Brown is a poet and an MA student at Northern Illinois University, where he studies literature, rhetoric, and writing. He lives and works in the suburbs of Chicago.
In the artist’s words:
Aurelie Crisetig: “This belongs to everyone, so enjoy the view” depicts the alteration of landscapes through digital topography. The fragment of areas assembled together compose an ensemble of imaginary panoramas. Every pattern of land represents a variation of time and space in both the digital and physical world. Merged together, each landscape becomes an abstract vision of mending views, recreating a conceptual, unknown environment. These patchworks of sceneries taken from Google Earth express how diverse a location on our planet can appear through a visual dispositive.
These transfigurations were both digitally manmade by the apparatus used to capture the landscape, but also physically transformed by the global warming produced by human beings. Both changes depict the unpredictable development of landscape during this tumultuous time. Not being able to explore the world during this tough time is pushing every creative artist to explore different path and alternative to fill the void of producing art in a stable environment. As a street photographer, my work revolves around the outside, the architecture and streets, the open air, the outdoor. Google Earth is nowadays my only resource for my work and my only escape on the outside.