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Sugar Woman
—on Gustav Klimt’s
Portrait
of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
1907
She
flumes
milk-skinned
through
the curve-
clung gown
as
though she
were
built of
god
eyes:
bosom
to belly,
hips
to ankles.
Or
peacock feathers
cloaked
in amber
wings
amid whorls
of
silver and gold.
All fragile glint
—as if everything
could
dissolve
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at
any moment
to
burnt sugar.
Lady
Holding a Cat
—Katsushika Hokusai,
c. 1810s
She’s wrapped fold over
fold over fold, her iromuji
layered
like swaddling, binding her arms close
around
her feline treasure. A madonna
protecting
her tiny charge, she hugs it to her cheek,
makes
them almost one, their faces wrought
in
the subtlest of lines, as if the artist wanted
to
convey diminishing physicality, crescive spirit
in
the suggested warmth of their mingled breath.
His
stroke guides focus to the only other point
of
interest, this spiraled garb—no background,
no
flowering twigs to ease the starkness—and
his lines
grow
dark, harsh, her robes angular at her back,
armor
auguring danger. As though out of the frame,
like
a Herodian soldier, threat advances.
Bernadette McBride has published two poetry collections,
Food, Wine, and Other Essential Considerations (Aldrich Press) and Waiting for
the Light to Change (WordTech Press). She is a three-time Pushcart Prize
nominee, whose poems have appeared in U.S. and UK journals and on PRIs The
Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She has taught creative writing at
Temple University and currently teaches writing and literature at Bucks County
Community College. She served as Pennsylvania Poet Laureate for Bucks County
(2009), and is poetry co-editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. You can
visit her at bernadettemcbrideblog.wordpress.com.
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Cristina's World by Andrew Wyeth, 1948 |
I never asked to be dressed in pink
muslin, much less to be born in this feature-
less field. How many days did I wake
to
find myself down on the ground?
Nights,
he came to me, breath akin
to
wet hay. Walked me to the barn—
the
length of a belt away. Silent.
A
tuning fork, vibrating. In my mind,
I
was already naked and nestled
within
a crow's wing. I’d swing
across the widening to where
across the widening to where
the
end of thought, end of want
was
not nested somewhere in this shit-
brown
hair. If the night was kind,
I
might return to find him gone.
I’d
stumble across this apron of grass,
crumpling
as far away as I could get
yet
still see what passed for home.
for the pinking sky to be brought to a stop—
framed. I’d turn my head from left to right.
Search
for the sensible horizon.
Lissa
Kiernan is the author of Two Faint Lines in the Violet (Negative
Capability Press, 2014), a Foreword Reviews' 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year
Award Finalist, as well as a finalist for the 2014 Julie Suk Award for Best
Poetry Book by an Independent Press. Her book-length braided essay, Glass Needles & Goose Quills: Elementary
Lessons in Atomic Properties, Nuclear Families, and Radical Poetics, is forthcoming
in the spring of 2016. Read more at lissakiernan.com
Hi Lisa - How lovely to see the Klimt and read the poem, while the wrapping of the arms around 'le chat' evokes much, and the Wyeth ... they all reminded me of films I've seen, or articles I've read ... loved seeing them. Good luck to both Bernadette and Lissa - poetry is a real art ... cheers Hilary
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