Born in Manila and raised in the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is a Filipina poet and author of For Want
of Water (Beacon Press, 2017), selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning judge
Gregory Pardlo as winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series. She is also the
author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner
of the 2011 American Book Award, selected by judge James Bertolino. She
currently teaches in the Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El
Paso.
 |
| Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist Number 1, 1950 |
Pollock’s Lavender Mist Number 1
The woman in the well undrowning is almost
through the water, her hair slips up in strings.
Boiling out, her body is in becoming:
ghost-like, or like a human, the artist does
not say. (This is his trick, this perfect
just-surfacing.) All at once you can see a
forehead, the hard septum of her nose—still,
vague as an idea, she could be your mother,
wet behind a door. What kinds of human
drowning have rubbed along my own
mother’s flesh and muzzled it yellow,
mewing out those sounds I heard as a girl,
shivering in her hallway? The woman in the
well undrowning is almost through the paper,
