After Lasanskyʻs The Artist and His Wife Emilia Barragan
& Natasha Tretheweyʻs “Repentance”

To make this Barragan painted strips of crayola green stripes
lattices childlike a man seated in the air a nowhere suit a woman
on his lap a woman with eyes wide closed like Twiggy a hand
pointing back at her breast as if to say why me? Though sheʻs
been called a slut a complicated callous needy woman you might
see between the kohl-black tendrils shielding her eyes in her
point blank stare fear The bald man sitting down on nothing
holds the woman down by her hips her legs just a thin scratch
of orange paint December 16 30 12 Before this maybe she
was talking to the man about sales metrics or the problem sets
due December 16 or the book she read that made her heart hurt
so sick that she wanted to sink scream cry but the man sat
her down & told her how she was needed Keats said that art
is not life not moving & living & levering out of the
aluminum frame to say But in the grasp of the charcoal
shadowed man I see me sitting in the grasp of my chemistry
classroom desk It was the 16th of some month after you’d told
me that my plaid skirt was too short for the Carolina climate &
looked at my Twiggy tendril handwriting of a problem which
you pronounced was wrong Later during the news on the
drive home I must have looked as she did eyes wide closed I
didn’t want to open them and see the graphic lattices pronouncing
that men were legally holding women down by their hips The
Writer and the State of Alabama this is moving but not living