By Melissa McKinstry

When Google says your storage is 50% full at 7.6 GB, and you begin to sift, you discover
your dead son’s vaccination records, that you can use the Google One storage manager
to clean up space by deleting large or unwanted files,

and today the docent told you Elaine de Kooning signed her paintings E de K
because she was a woman in a man’s world of Abstract Expressionism,
painting bullfights for ten years,

and your dead friend’s partner said she’s finding messages everyday: a heart-shaped light
with wings glowing from no findable source, except maybe the painting
I’ve always thought is him, and a medium at the celebration of life yesterday talked to him
in the hibiscus, while you sweated in the Rocky Mountain foothills listening to stories
of the dead, watching the pink petals for a sign,

and this evening, It’s coming already, the waiter says of the food at Alma Fonda Fina–
the fine soul of the hole in the wall—he translates for you when you fumble, and you wonder
again about the docent asking Did you know JFK was a fidgeter, and you’re thinking
did he know what was coming already when E de K was commissioned to paint his portrait,
and he could only sit for ten minutes, always in motion, and she sketched rapidly
then returned to her studio to paint him, from a ladder, on a huge canvas, and in that painting
at the National Portrait Gallery, he looks like he’s still moving,

and Joan Mitchell saw floods of color when she heard sound, and that’s called synesthesia,
and if you’re a painter who’s an Abstract Expressionist, and your aim is to capture a shimmer
of light, this is useful, so she played music while she painted: Mozart or jazz, nothing heavy,
reports the docent, Hemlock and Ladybug made Mitchell famous, and Mitchell said,
I paint from remembered landscapes which I carry with me,

and today was free day at the Denver Art Museum, so you made a donation
and thought about painting on a ladder, wielding a paintbrush on a pole, or a palette knife
with a deft touch in a world that wanted a woman to be a man because a woman
who was a woman shouldn’t be painting these things,
and you’re pretty sure every one of those women felt compelled to keep a steady effort,
stretch another canvas, attend another bullfight, select another color,
listen to another track, and keep carrying it with them—

just like you did for your son, because after his birth, you knew your own synesthesia:
sorrow for joy, what was coming already even though it wouldn’t happen for 26 years,
and you’re back at the computer in the 7.6 GB of sound and color touching your boy again
a shimmer of light, a matador in fuchsia, impossible pink hibiscus, a jazz
track, the landscape you carry—an expanding canvas.

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Melissa McKinstry hosts poetry and jazz events and curates a Poet Tree in San Diego. Her poetry appears in Beloit, Adroit, and Best New Poets, and was selected for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. The inagural writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland, she currently serves on their Board and on the Alumni Council for Pacific University’s MFA program. MelissaMcKinstry.com