diamonds
The landscapes were in my arms as I did it.
– Helen Frankenthaler
red, yellow, orange gradient of triangle and fog line
acrylic paint, hand stretched canvas, gesso, charcoal
The backdrop was fog colored and your hair, tied back, reminded me of a bent in half fish. I wanted you to mean something to me. And here you are with your triangles, your search for non-organic shapes, the perfect edge against which you will lie, alone, swished through a madness of hue of line. The border you taped off is crooked I’ll say.
§
purple and blue red chainlink
oil, hand stretched canvas
I’d say your love is something of that fence. I’ve never touched that space between your diamonds. Inside of the box truck, your body is in a t-shirt. My eyes are in my head. You want me to be like those girls on television, all of the women have large breasts and their men work all day. They stay home and Sara Lee their lives and I am too young to notice their currency. I reach between the ice in the refrigerator for a visual representation of blueblack. You say, just close your eyes. When the light hits at 4pm, you say I’m her again, but you mean, I’m me again. Last night, when you were painting with your mouth open, I told you you have beautiful ivory teeth.
§
green blue purple and golden lines
oil, hand stretched canvas
It is a phase of anonymity I am going through. This is because we do not have a landline because you think it too permanent. We have a cable converter. A long black snake across the sea bream brown carpet. We have heavy metal forks. I make you dinner and you are pleased because I do it naked. Today, I sent you a picture of my breasts, pink. Today we fought about wet laundry in a bag.
§
purple and odd blue and double orange with green
oil, hand stretched canvas with fabric and multimedia
I am alone again. Sometimes when the clouds touch like this, I tremble into your arms. I have no direction other than the one that I am heading in. There is a decoupage map on our living room table so we always have a place to point to. Our town is circled.
§
large grey sky and starving shapes that are leaving their bodies
oil on hand stretched canvas
Once, I was an enormous person so enormous the house refused to house me. A whale and the ocean too far. The sky showered us with earth weapons of no small destruction. You confused them for diamonds. It was like a hail storm that ferried us into a new form of eating words called dialogue. Confusion came in rays when light hit and clouds scattered the rays like shattered glass. Here we were, one enormous and one small. The starving eddies of a dam starved harder in competition.
§
tremendous orange and fat gray face over a chain link marvel
sketch on vellum, water colors
I imagine each plateau on your plate handpicked to answer because you couldn’t trust anyone else to do it. I am so afraid of you. I am afraid you will tire of my sea-ish greenbrown hair and my limited view of the trees from our front window because I am short and because of this you will leave me. You will leave me. Saying it prepares me.
§
three jealous diamonds under gesso in afterimage
oil on canvas on plate glass
She was bright and she glossed over like a shining web. You, shining, paint. You, gloss and the canvas of your hands. She welded your iron into an anchor. Instead of throwing you, hung you inside of her shirt, right where she needed to be stopped.
§
dirty little whirlwind performance piece
clay, music, people
Instead of paper—song and clay. And inspired, the sheet fell
away from your face to reveal it will always be imagined—the fill.
You kept her clean. You baked her in the light of the windowsill. Scooped her as if from shell and you said you loved everyone and you loved nothing and you loved me, a quiet grey. Away from your face, the sheet fell and that is when she said: thank you for a role to play.
§
black diamond love symbol and one purple soul
oil, hand stretched canvas
This is an imitation of the good kind. Your favorite hand, the left, made it, stitched. The diamonds in thick oil and you called it: fearsome. I remarked how all studios are white and scary and large, and you said to no one you loved that you desire being big and scary. You were looking not at me but at M’s black diamonds laid beneath a figure robed in feathers. It was his smallest.
(Secret: I know a way to make diamonds. I know a way to makes largeness out of smallness and I can show you: when I’m pressed down—press e down—leave me no air and leave. Bury me under a rock—let no air leave. Then leave. Or disappear for twenty-one years. When you return from your leaving, I will still be being made.)