By Melissa McKinstry

Put your arms through the sleeves of this Bauhaus swirl.
Let it drape from your shoulders, a shawl of distraction
in abstraction: Kandinsky’s Dominant Curve. Feel the fine seams
of your private mourning, the silky sway of teabag brown,
sage green. Let yourself be satin amidst bisecting
angles and arcs. You might find a hidden pocket.
You might hold onto what isn’t. When my son was young,
no one knew why the toggle of his genes didn’t fit.
I kept slippering down hallways to brush my teeth in fluorescence,
the smell of hospital soap deep in my skin. Each day
a moving staircase of dread with a hair’s breadth handrail, a repeating
pattern of unpredictability, cut on the bias, selvedge edged.
His small misshapen head, tiny useless feet curved like lyres,
little hands always infant-dimpled. When he died
26 years later, he was still surreal, but let me tell you about his eyes:
blue riders, blue mountains, blue roses. He was the dominant curve
of my life. Somehow Kandinsky painted it all, so I clipped a jigsaw
of it together over and over after the after. The dining room table
like a wall at the Guggenheim. This canvas my favorite kimono.
If this piece feels soft and worn to you too, pull it closer, shrug it up
around your neck. It’s quiet inside these colors, a place you can hear
how things were. All those sharp pins and needles tacked
these shapes together to be basted then stitched, hemming in
what I couldn’t believe: I was going to live a life
impossibly imperfect. Full of chaos. Full of not knowing.
Full of my son’s suffering. I was going to live a life designed
by a dominant curve. Kandinsky said, Everything starts from a dot.

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Melissa McKinstry hosts quarterly poetry and jazz evenings and cu- rates a community Poet Tree in San Diego. Her poetry appears in Beloit, Adroit, and Best New Poets 2023, and has been selected for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. An Adroit Djanikian Scholar and writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland, she currently serves on the Alumni Council for Pacific University’s MFA program and the Board of the Millay House Rockland.

The art is Kandinsky.