after Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist’, kept in the dark room at the National Gallery This love is kept in the dark. You only visit it, through curtain Of hush and black, you step Into a different colour of time. There is no eye […]

after Odd Nerdrum’s painting ‘Running Bride’ Bride of a beast, silent, tyrant woman caged out of her own poem. I’ve been cradling a wet rag to his feet when I could be dressed in nothing but a summer mist. Where is that girl gutting a bear to wear its hide as a bride, chopping fur […]

after Bob Ross’s painting ‘Winter Mountain Lake’ It is an old story. Girls, perched on banks, shedding masks onto the moonlit pebbles. They are giggling, brushing white flecks off their noses. The myth tells them to drag fingers into the lake, lick the ripple, splash dirty off their mishaven legs. Mother warned of wolves nuzzling […]

after Franny Choi and Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball Series get up—as in the world goes on, as in you cannot not spin until you collapse into the couch next to you. do you know why you can move in a moving world? listen. you don’t hear the gentle whir of an axis, mounted on a […]

after Andrew Wyeth’s painting ‘Christina’s World’ 1 When there was such a thing as country I stood in a tobacco field and felt I was drowning 2 Now I can buy a muslin pink prairie dress online. If I don’t have enough money the website says I could cut my hair with an electric razor […]

after Edward E. Simmons’s painting ‘Old Woman Peeling an Orange’ The art of peeling an orange gets harder each passing season. Still, her thumbnail presses under the rind like it’s an envelope, a love note from long-gone seasons, ones where the shadows bleed out at noon, and the rain is delicate as a chandelier. It […]

after Doris Salcedo’s photograph ‘Shibboleth I’ Tell me, do I pass this test? All day I have studied the ways things break apart – the shapes of the spaces they leave behind. It is not unusual, to want to know how two halves of a peach pull away from pit, how scalpels propagate brief stories […]

after Mira Dancy’s painting ‘Blue Exile’        Mid March I give up my lungs.   Here are the seedy airways that have shrunk              in my chest; here                                      is a bruised […]