ISSUE 11

Grace Lynn

 

Penance for Picasso​

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I’ve got a batshit crazy cracked
open piñata of Picasso anatomies:
humerus going off curb
your enthusiasm script drops
out, one eye beats your grandpa’s
vintage TV at static circuitry, undocked
brainstem skydives seatbelt
less, bladder turns
its notifications off. Picasso,
forgive me for side
stepping you for Vermeer’s milk
maid, Degas’ ballet
recitals, Renoir’s boating
party. Mistaking my pulse
for an RSVP to a life deprived
of mortality. Delicious    
deceits of rose polished
toenails, a CoverGirl

bespoke body, idle idol
on a picnic bench & stretching
hamstrings in a tutu
& a backbone backpacked
in butterfly wings.
Fairytales for a girl curled
under the bed skirt
of a grownup gaze. I am cleaned
out, Russian
dolls & macaroni necklaces, the hard
drive of my mind Swiffer
swept with the totaled
Toyota of my popped
out arm, my piano
fingers practicing minor
scales minus keys. I always
blank to take stock
of my missing
femur, up for auction
in eBay wars. I’ll bargain, Picasso,
yard sale you a dislocated
clavicle. The full unboxed
set of me would pair
nicely with Guernica or the line
of women you played

Henry VIII on without even touching

them. Surgically
resecting, fusing nipples
to wrists, bisecting
a nose with your genitalia. Any casual
move of yours will do.

Back in the golden
age of my feet, I flipped
you the bird, skedaddling
to the Great Masters of the body
as pastel Shirley Temple
dimples & curves steeped  
in marshmallow topped hot
chocolate. I dodged
you like the playground
bully who knocked
on my back brace. Always,
you hung right
inside, outing the body
like a queer standing proud
on a barstool to list a dozen
pronouns to surface   
what lies beneath.

 

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Self-Portrait as Carles Casagemas in Picasso’s La Vie

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We have arrived, bluest nudes

as gangrene limbs, as birth

 

in nothing but my loincloth. Blue is how

we begin & how we end. I taste its tin 

 

in my tears. I hear its roar in the waves, 

in Virginia Woolf’s heavy pockets

 

of rocks & in Sylvia Plath’s oven-baked 

brains. Its synesthesia is surrender, boiling 

 

pots of incipient snow. It’s what we know 

we do not know. I point at the woman

 

shawled in pleats of modest fabric

clinging to a sleeping infant. She turns 

 

her neck to me as if my envy survives 

my own suicide. I am my eyes, my muscled 

 

thighs, my abdomen. If only the body 

could make plain strangling emotions 

 

in the slight hinges of my knees, the swerve 

of my hips, the funnel of my gaze. I am 

 

futureless, impotent as a wasp denied  

the birthright to make pollen 

 

or a fig to flit from female to its own 

death to birth the next generation 

 

of genes. Picasso left two paintings 

of crouched figures at my back, knots 

 

of flesh. They remind me of his Old Guitarist

& dark palette descending into shadows

 

of homelessness, depression, & disease to share

his brokenness, to wade into waves 

 

so deep to reconfigure my lost

life & to locate the switch 

 

on his rosebud light. 

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