Eyes travel from canvas to porcelain, flowers
arranged with care, catching the right tone,
her brush flicks.
A squall bruises the cerulean sky.
Welts of indigo rise. The room flares
white, light divorced from shadow.
Her palette hot, each smear of paint burning.
The doorway, lintel near kindling, frames
Emily, fourteen, feline, grace and arrogance,
her beauty a warning almost too painful to bear.
The girl’s ******* her mother’s own before they fell
with time and weight and nursing.
Emily child skin sloughed off, flesh ripe, glistening.
Old words drop on mother’s tongue, “I could eat you up
(as you ate me).” Images in the painter mind
of porous *******, Emily’s rooting lips, shirts, blouses
marked with nursing and her own early nights,
reveries of a man and, by him, a baby.
(But the man never ravished her as the child did. His anger
burned sienna between sheets and walls
for months as she kneaded pleasure from the rising swell
beneath her belly until muddied by blues, sullen
he left.)
“How was school today?” mother asks warily, resentful
to be so. The daughter turns to head below
and slit-mouthed breaths, “Fine.” The word
a jagged line across her mother’s work, cut roses,
carnations, mums, a Delft tureen. Brushstrokes writhe,
clench into figures---mother, father, Emily---and vanish
as laughter, a tease of easy joy no longer shared,
rolls upstairs. Mother’s hand, the brush
too tightly grasped, shakes and spirits spill.
She sits in bathroom quiet, tissues wet with salted tears.
Feet scuffle from down to up, a knock opens the door.
“Mom, take me to the drugstore. I need
some stuff!”
The painting day a ruin. “Only if you want do you need.”
“At least I use them,” from Emily, crimson flush
to her soft defiant cheek. She turns, but
mother’s hand to keep her youth from going grabs her skirt.
It rips. Emily’s nails rake her mother’s face
who, hand to cheek, is amazed to find palms stained with alizarin blood.
In fearful flight from what she’s done, Emily raises a tube
fat with madder rose and holds
the canvas hostage. Colored snakes inch out. Emily
and her mother now striped reds with blood and paint,
souls soaked through,
thick with love. The tall grass outside steams.
