Recognition

 

It’s time to welcome the magnolia,
her pink flushed cups, petals tight
on black twigs, her cold courage,
a clench of fuck yous aimed at winter.
No one picks her. Twisted off,
she’d taste astringent as chicory,
puckering the mouth, resisting all the way.
You can’t drink from her acid chalice.
She’ll choose her own sunlit hour
to drench in citrus, to throw away
all she once held so close to the core,
against a glare of blue sky and sudden rain.

 
 

    Votive Offering

after Urs Fischer

 

In the window, Dasha melts for the public,
a lit wick in her skull. Her fondant pink
frock (Oscar de la Renta) is a slow slippage
on a translucent shoulder, and combed-out
wax tresses trickle onto her breast. She burns,
says the gallerist, for a buyer who’ll check
this deliberate very public dissolution,
who’ll snuff her out, and strike her alight
on high days or holidays; and who, when
she gutters completely (her apricot heels
a hardening puddle in a pink-and-white lake)
will scrape her up, recast her — and consume
her again. Her candle, aflame, confronts
her creator. Who is there to save her now?

 

(In response to ‘Dasha’, 2019, a sculpture by Urs Fischer)