in the mountains, we remove our clothes                              those costume carcasses, charter atlas

rid ourselves of sorrow, its mediocrity                          its hesitant ache, savants of the massifs

Dangle god over water. Don’t listen to his pleas & cock / your head to the side to see him turn red in the face.

Homs / twenty sixteen / the house my father grew up in / once sat between these two matchbox buildings / now broken teeth / see the shell-gouged street / he used to play in / buckled floors stacked like decks / of playing cards / focus the eye on middle distance / missing years / clotheslines before they snapped

Esteban del Valle is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago, Illinois in 1984.  He completed his MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, where he received a Presidential Scholarship and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. His work investigates the performance of leadership, the role of the artist as a public figure, and the effects of class and privilege on institutions in the form of paintings, murals, sculpture and video art.