After Picasso’s Woman in A Black Hat, Toledo Museum of Art
I think of her geometric rhetoric,
black hat akin to scarlet A,
their liaison that opened in Paris——
how many, after all, open in Paris?
Your first feral message came
from that city too, your barren
bed, photo of your sheets, empty
without me. Suffer our carnal. Suffer
our botched attempts, the compass
we broke on the rocks of moral.
Not every tryst is touch and skin.
We breech the ether, sting until
our wrists become numb fire,
snared in send. Emphasize her hand,
struck from frame, as if to point out
the way we’ve toggled, once,
again, just to see how far.
Already we’ve cornered
ourselves into angle, faceted
our faces, turned up the brim
for an eye that sees too much.
Note: Fernande Olivier, the subject of this painting, worked as an artist’s model and became one of Picasso’s lovers.
Goddess 2.0
My name rises
from the dark.
You’ve saved me
under contacts
like this——
Goddess
Screen-lit,
this becomes
how you
call me,
tangling
into familiar——
and you are,
you say
with your mouth,
you are,
as you sing to me,
you are,
as you confirm
to my ear, Goddess,
trace the letters over
me with your hands, write
them in careful
capitals over
anniversary cards
we open together.
And after our years,
in our fade, I catch
an alert. Beaming
from your phone
I am now in two
initials, bare,
and you have
no explanation.
I am sorry, you say,
to atmosphere, to me.
Until
nothing——
I could have kept
what you gave,
been her still, haloed
in white, winged in joy.
But you changed me
without question.
You try to soften it,
give my two initials
a middle “G,” one vacant
character of cowardice.
I had been falling, so willing,
and from my own sky, too.
Now I must learn
to forge everything,
left only in the heat
of myself.
Grief in Two Letters
My distant ex texts, hot
with his charmed gentle
of questions. It’s Friday,
late. I’ve already cracked
a new bottle of Pinot, think
oh fuck it. He bruises back in,
flashing need on my screen, takes
us back to high school, that version
he goes to when lonely, how we
should have——you know, duh——
He won’t take nostalgia naked,
he never does, but starves
memory just enough that I lick,
desperate for the yes of witness.
We type forgettable things, music
that once meant more, friendships
we learned to lock behind doors
of never. But he’s here, send
after send, and I like the slake
of our abstinence. Once,
I would have broken
everything to have his name
light up my hand, and now,
it is only a thorn
in what I wish
were you, your ring
a buzz against boredom,
your voice
in its damned boyish
——hi——
halting my body
with a single syllable.
After Monet’s Tempête côtes de Belle Île and Les Rochers de Belle Île, la Côte sauvage, Musée d’Orsay
How not to see them as sisters——
one in fog, one clear, the wars
of waves between them? Tempête
offers long swoops of brush, a rush
in the violence, the float of white
over green over grey. Think purple
of cascade, water caught in seize
even through speed, the shimmer
without sheen of rain horizon,
and the three blue waves looking
to catch the stingy light. Take the frost
and foam of flotsam, the myth
of mist, shudder water capsizing
the clear. In this froth and effluvia,
water captured, pinned, the layers
of movement move into one whole
of perception. By contrast, Rochers:
what of negative, or positive,
where rocks appear as fur, profile,
dense lush of green bittered by brown
of purple? Here, a camouflage of daubed
water, blue to aubergine to emerald,
the stir of turbulence and turn. But under
the swell, the deceptive binary of sky
and sea, light held, refracted back up
to cloud as if to say peace, as if offering,
as if even these siblings know
our barbs may never cease.
Julie E. Bloemeke (she/her) is the author of Slide to Unlock (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) and co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). A two-time recipient of Books All Georgians Should Read, she is also a 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist. Her poems have been featured on NPR, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Full Bleed, Nimrod, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, and others. An associate editor for South Carolina Review and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, she also directs the annual #5poets5parks initiative with Metroparks Toledo in honor of National Poetry Month. A contract-based writer, editor, teacher, and creative consultant, she can be found online at www.jebloemeke.com. Mess with her punctuation vigilante and you’ll get Independent Claws.
