Uncharted Frontier EZine Issue 12

by Allan Kaspar

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  Leaving Van Gogh

  By Loretta Oleck

  the wind mimes a language I learned years ago-

  a whispering tongue clicking and flexing

  a brush roaming across my palate

  across whatever has made its home inside my mouth-

  blades of grass, shards of glass, perfect purple grapes

  and cockamamie ideas about what to swallow,

  what to taste, what to hold onto, and what to release

  ideas that would later get me into trouble

   

  there was a time that paint pulsed through my tangled veins

  instead of blood

  when art was the flood of beats and sounds

  swooshing from the reapers sweep, from the weeping children,

  from surrounding towns that I had never seen

   

  as the reaper with his sharpened scythe cut down ears of wheat

  I twirled round my ragged doll, stripped it of its pinafore

   

  it isn’t all pretty

   

  that’s what I heard

   

  you too will slip into ugliness

   

  these words were brushed and bruised with accentuated lines

  impassioned with impasto-

  reams of color and textured sheaves of wheat passed down

  from the hands of Van Gogh from his barred bedroom window

   

  streams of sulfur yellow with a tinge of violent violet

  whipping through me like a sweep of the scythe

  cutting through the myth that this might have been a place to heal

   

  do you understand childhood isn’t real?

  throw the baby doll away

  you can’t play house forever

   

  inside this place where Van Gogh waited

  they took away my canvas and my brush

  stripped me down and dressed me in a gown-

  ball-gown, hospital-gown, wedding-gown, bed-gown

   

  a hare-brained idea to raze off my locks

  plant seeds in my scalp-

   

  we can harvest something in that fallow ground

   

  then one night a thick braid sprouted from nothing-

  long enough to dangle down from between the bars

  strong enough to hold the load of my youth

   

  leaving my rag doll on the windowsill

  I lowered myself down the plaited tail

  escaping Van Gogh and his haystacks-

  a tableau of golden mounds on a reaper’s field

  I concealed myself under a shield of sky smeared in black

  I was healed and I would never be coming back

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  Corn on Stalk -- by Faith Kuzio