Tag: Art

In haraqa al-film

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jory Mickelson

[One translation of the Arabic title is when a camera’s film is literally burned by the sun] 

In the photographic crypt in Lebanon,
Studio Scheherazade, where amid the hundreds
of thousands of negatives sometimes 

an image will emerge of friends,
lovers, or something in-between, same-gendered
couples playing marriage, behind 

the photographer’s screen, unable to be taken
into the afternoon’s harsh light, the small town’s streets,
where, if exposed all is ruined. 

So too, in the layering of history,
every Egyptian hieroglyph gives you side-eye.
Each Persian relief: 

side-eye, maybe smiling. But an Akkadian
never deigns to look at you at all, a glance beneath
their dignity. Their eyes  

on some king in symmetrically crinkled robes
& perfectly tasseled hair, stiff as the ceramic smocks
of the Sumerian votive statuettes— 

the Sumerian’s eyes enlarged
because their eyes were watching a god—
until we carted them off  

to some white-walled museum where they look
now upon the lookers, praying their dusty prayers,
in climate-controlled absence.  

Our prayers, too, will go unseen
or be lost beyond our time, the gods forgotten,
and every couple a speculation.

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Self-Portrait as Someone Not Supposed to Be Here

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

Because of a clerical error for which the temp agency sincerely apologizes,
today I’m a tour guide at “Jimmy’s Sistine-Chapel Warehouse Replica

and Gift Shop!” where I try to avoid laser-pointing to the Biblical genitals while children
and art critics ask about pigment-to-egg ratios of contemporary fresco restoration.

These people saved for weeks for a tour with an eloquent expert named
Albert, and I won’t tell them they got me instead. Though my father warned,

“Don’t trust someone who never says, I don’t know,” when the critics question if I’m sure
the panel overhead is titled “Then God Makes a Red Planet,” I think not of my father,

but of confident, informed Albert and shout, “Contrapposto!” which is a word
I remember from art appreciation class. “Why is that naked man building a boat?”

a child asks about Noah, and I say, “God wanted a re-do.”
When I point to Samson’s rippling thighs, I am embarrassed I wore shorts.

How often have I wished to exchange body parts—legs, stomachs—with a passerby?
One who could walk tall surrounded by all these fearless nudes.

The children are confused about God
ready to touch his index finger to Adam’s, assembling him from dirt.

“God should have used gold or rubies,” a blond boy says, “but who am I to criticize?”
A girl asks, “So Adam is our great-great grampa?” “If so,” I say, “Our great-great-great grampa

is earth.” The critics point at me, and I point at the ceiling, where, as usual,
the divine and the human point at each other.

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A Little Longer

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matthew Thorburn

Featured Art: Polar Chroma Midnight by John Sabraw

“Tickets, please,” he calls out, “Tickets!”
and I think, Hang on, I know him,
the conductor who shuffles toward me
down the aisle, this big guy, pink-
cheeked, coppery buttons on his dark
blue suit, his blue cap with a short
sharp brim jammed down over reddish
hair, shirt collar disappearing

beneath his curly red beard, look how
he keeps his feet set wide like
a sea captain, sways in the nonplace
of our constant motion, as I heard a French
philosopher call it, the steady-as-she-goes
of this racketing NJ Transit train,
his ticket nippers going click-click,
click-click, poor morning light catching

the pixie dust of ticket snips sprinkled
behind him as he calls out again,
“Tickets, tickets,” coming closer now,
not asking but naming what he wants,
and there’s something I want
to tell him after this shock of recognition,
startled awake by a world
made strange again, but is this

really the place to say, You know,
you look just like Joseph Roulin the postman,
Van Gogh’s friend, his neighbor he painted
five or six times back in 1889 and you
can go see down in Philly at the Barnes,
then relate how Roulin sorted the mail
each day at the train station in Arles
where Van Gogh used to go to send

paintings home to Theo, how Roulin
cared for him when he cut himself,
wrote letters to his family, welcomed him
into his own, made Van Gogh’s life
a little better, probably a little
longer, though the conductor I imagine
is not a son of Arles, though maybe
of Manalapan, but up close I see

his badge says JOE, his sapphire eyes 
are filled with delight, filled with
deep light, just the way Van Gogh painted
them, as I’d like to tell him
in this moving moment we share
when he says “Tickets” once more and
then—Click-click—punches mine
and then—“Here you go”—hands it back

since I’ll need it to board the AirTrain
at Newark, but because this train
keeps rattling along, he keeps walking,
calls out again, clicks his nipper
once, twice, just because, and that’s when
I spot it, there at his coat hem, how
it glints and burns in the dusty light,
that smudge of sunflower yellow.

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North River Shad, c. 1910

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lindsay Atnip

Featured Art: Green Fish About to Eat the Fish Hook Wall Art by The Lazy Artist Gallery

William Merritt Chase painted numerous versions of fish still
lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across
the country. Because of the popularity of these works, the artist
worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.”
—placard, Art Institute of Chicago

The real thing rots. Corrupts,
               Decays, time-lapses, hollow to holes.

But yours—immortal, silver-scaled, so round—
               (Why should its roundness be wrenching?)

               Realer than the real.

You were afraid this was what they’d remember you for.
               Afraid—as if there were somehow more than this.

Here one sees, forever, how it could fill the hand—
               How it would feel, filling one’s hand.

               One could do worse than be a painter of fishes.

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Work in Progress

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lance Larsen

Featured Art: “Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist” by Perino del Vaga

Use what’s handy color pencil shavings
dirt maybe bug parts cat hair also saliva

lots of it no paint or collage nothing
modern just a smudgy finger on textured

paper grind the colors in or swoosh
them around like a muskrat in mud

no pattern at first till wet scratches
turn chance into sky fear into a face

yours and not yours call this turmoil time
and materials call this a case of falling

feelingly if stuck have your beloved spit
on the dry parts pop failures in the oven

let divinity simmer let the making
unmake you every doubt an inky wing

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Roost

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Janice N. Harrington

Featured Art: Nude Figures by Cape Creus by Salvador Dalí

Circling above bare limbs, like Dalí’s wild and articulate capes,
black wings undulate. Raucous hundreds settle and splat
their stench. A murder of crows, a give-a-fuck mob,
stirs the air above ash and oak and hackberry, milling
and loud with news: day heralds, unwelcomed Cassandras.
Dawn light pinched by a crow’s beak, pieces of light falling
everywhere, bright meat that the crow pecks, strips away.

The crows know my neighbor’s face. Knowledgeable birds,
they know the way I hurry each morning, the way my eyes try
to read their dark signs: articulate smoke, curtains
of a confession booth. Blessing? Pardon? Mercy?
The stories say that crows suffer scorched wings, that they
are cursed for stealing from the gods. But the stories, as always, err,
wind-running, wings wide, a-glide on a slide of air,
black bodies, bituminous-black, cosmos-black rising to soar.
There is no damnation in their dizzying speed, the break-wing
improvisations of their flight. God–blessed and black,
their sharp notes strike my skull like hailstones or chunks
of sky, dark bodies that lift my eyes and scorn gravity, a lesser law.

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Reverse Sculpture

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Richard Dey

Featured Art: Untitled by Richard M. Loving

As the stone shrinks, the form expands.
—Michaelangelo

It’s like sculpting in reverse,
       learning about love:
Here’s a Maiden or Aphrodite or Venus,
       naked and polished
or is it the Doryphorus or David or . . .
Isn’t s/he nice? The Ideal in spirit and form?
       Miss or Mister Universe!

Then, in reverse, as you learn
about the apple of your eye
       in revelations you can hardly believe,
       (marble with veins like that!
       granite with such cracks!),
the stone chipped away chips back
       chip by chip, and chunk by chunk,
       all superfluous fugitives reuniting,
and not without the dusty air re-ringing
               with the tap-tapping of
       chisel and mallet, point and hammer,

refilling all the subtle negative spaces
that defined the planes and rhythms—
       mound and hollow, ridgeline and gap—
and the warmth that passed
       from the sculptor’s hands into the work,
all his perseverance, passes back . . .
until before you grandly stands, unhewn
and cold, a breathless, glacial block of stone,
       Lovelessness now reappointed
whose last words (whispered
       with chiseled lips lastly parted) were,
“Darling, are you disappointed?”

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There Was a Young Woman With Cancer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Featured Art: In the Spirit of Hoffmann by Paul Klee

With each remission she’d take it up again,
her search for proof her great love Edward Lear
was influenced by the Irish poet Mangan,
and while we weeded she would bend my ear
with her latest evidence: an owl here,
elsewhere a pussycat or a beard, a wren.
I was polite, but it was pretty thin.
There was one word, though,
some nonsense confabulation that occurred
in Mangan first, so odd that it could not
be accident. Then cancer, like a weed
we’d missed, some snapped-off root or dormant seed.
The last cure killed her. I would give a lot
to be able to recall that word.

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Gun on the Table

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

My favorite scene in Body Heat has nothing
To do with the intricate plot
That William Hurt and Kathleen Turner
Devise to kill her rich, oppressive husband.
My favorite scene, maybe ten seconds long,
Shows Hurt getting into his car as an antique
Convertible drives by, a fully costumed clown
At the wheel, waving. Hurt stares, slightly
Bewildered, while the clown passes and disappears.
That’s it. Cut to Hurt and Turner in another
Sweaty sex scene and post-coital planning,
The foregone noir conclusion closing in. Meanwhile,
Since we know there are no meaningless details
In art, we keep expecting the clown to reappear
Or at least figure indirectly yet clearly in the action.
Like Chekhov said—if there’s a gun on the table
In act one, it had better be fired by act three.
But no, the clown is random, there and gone, an odd,
Unrelated moment like any of the ones that pass us
Every day and we barely notice
Because life isn’t art, isn’t revised for coherence,
Not until our lives collapse around us
Like a circus tent in flames
And we begin to look for the alarm we missed.

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for Claude Monet

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Michael Casey

Featured Art: Water Lilies by Claude Monet

I mean the excitement level
was just about in negative numbers
as my sister’s basketball team
lost its seventh straight
and after it
the girls are jumping up and down
in total glee
genuine happihappihappiness
the reason? they broke the magic number
ten in the losing score
they didn’t actually break it
but they finally made it to that number
no sense of perspective
in art too you have to see
my sister’s painting
of the flour mill with water wheel
the central subject of which is a frog
amidst the water lilies

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2 Fuzzy Bees

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton

Featured Art: A Gentleman Who Wanted to Study the Habits of Bees too Closely, plate 6 from Pastorales by Honoré Victorin Daumier

“La créateur est pessimiste, la création ambitieuse,
donc optimiste.” —René Char

Because I feared I’d only make a mess
Sticking yellow pom-poms onto black ones,
Or bungle wings as I tried to shape the white
Pipe-cleaners into an outline of flight,
I never opened this kit I got one Christmas
In my stocking—a joke from my sister:
Create A Critter. Since I’m cleaning house
I could throw it away. But all I need
To make 2 Fuzzy Bees are glue and scissors.
Everything’s here—the velvet-tipped feelers,
Button noses, and eyes with moving pupils.
Ages 6 and Up—well, that’s me, isn’t it?
And as an Adult, too, I can Supervise
Myself. So why do I still hesitate?
If I make a bad bee I can toss it out.
Look at this package. The cellophane’s intact,
Directions printed on the cardboard backing.
Even the little loose eyes seem to twinkle
Inviting me to stick them to the heads
Where they belong. Yes, they’re Choking Hazards,
But I’m alone right now, no cats or babies,
And the dining room table is cleared of junk.
And so I do it. Soon my Fuzzy Bees
Are finished, bouncing on their wire legs,
Looking up at me, cute as their photos,
Ready to begin their lives as . . . what?
What have I done? I’ve given them existence.
Their wings will never lift them to the sky,
Their red noses will never scent a rose,
But look at them! Ambitious, optimistic.

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The Immortals

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rick Bursky

In the painting of the young couple kissing
on a bench in a museum hallway
I’m the subject of the portrait
hanging on the wall behind them.
I’m wearing the blue velvet jacket
of an eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry officer
standing beside a white horse that’s too large to be accurate.
Though I’m rendered with lifelike precision. Obviously,
I couldn’t have served in the eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry.
I don’t speak German, and was born centuries late.
I’m not the first person to pay
a famous artist to be in a painting.
Though I wanted to be the man being kissed.
Unfortunately, my famous artist didn’t believe
a girl that lovely would kiss me in public.
I offered photographs of previous lovers
but unless one was kissing me on a bench
in a museum hallway his answer was no.
That’s unfair. Otherwise I’m pleased
with the painting. The couple kissing,
I suspect, also paid to be in the painting.
Though I’m certain they were strangers.
Her eyes are open, peering at where
we might stand admiring the painting.
Instead of resting on his cheek, the palm of her hand
is pushing, proving that while she desired
to live forever in art, her desire didn’t include him.
I once fell thirty-seven feet
from a railroad bridge into a river.
Riding the ambulance to the hospital
is when I decided to pay a famous artist
to put me in a painting.
What brought the woman to the painting
is something I’ve often fantasized about.
The oxygen mask’s elastic strap
pinched the back of my neck.
I kept the discomfort to myself.

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