These days, she drinks light,
shelves those costly oils,
her sable brush, the palette’s whorls—azure,
cobalt, cyanine—sky piece hues,
left to clot. Since the surgery,
she cannot bear time vanishing, stroke
by stroke. She lives to swim
through twilight’s milk, to echo
birds on high, larking away,
to chew the new-picked April
clover stem, four-leafed or not.
She will not mourn her lost breasts,
nor scenes she’ll never paint—finally
here, as is. Now.
About Laurie Klein
Laurie Klein's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ascent, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Southern Review, Terrain, and other journals. A winner of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, her chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh, won the Predator Press award. Klein's debut collection, Where the Sky Opens, A Partial Cosmography, is forthcoming from Cascade Books as part of The Poeima Poetry Series.
