by Devon Balwit
Tip your head to the side, and
the painting is on its way to becoming
a Rothko if Rothko were a woman and knew
a thing or two about washday,
like my grandmother, who could muscle
wet sheets onto a line, sleight-of-handing
clothespins from apron to mouth
without dropping either, then darning
and ironing before a dinner yet to be cooked,
or if Rothko had sat, slippered and skirted
in a market stall, a baby underneath
the folding table, another sorting scraps
in an inscrutable game, all the while calling out
how this scarf suited and that one was the cheapest
a passerby would find, or if Rothko had decided
to abandon abstraction and restore the particular
details that inspire preference, that speak
of skin and not the gallery, of hands wrapping
and gathering, a softness a cheek could press,
that hollow where a beloved’s chin might rest.
About the Author:
When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov and Stripe Press and Asterisk and Works in Progress Magazine. For more of her work, visit: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet