Marvyne Jenoff

Amethyst

An elder nude, self-portrait: Here I am in the studio, painting and being painted. I recline in profile, left arm along the back of a low settee, gaze fixed toward the amethyst bracelet on my wrist.

My painter self sees right breast drooping sideways toward the hip, old surgical scar persisting down the thigh, striped towel, rose-patterned settee, age-mottled arm sporting the amethyst bracelet. I select from my candy-store of colours, lay down large strokes.

The posing me is alternately nodding into naps and fretting about my life outside the studio: Left hand, committed to my cane, means the right must always choose between an umbrella and anything else at all; and my thumb’s not good—can’t even knit, my luscious yarns unused; This alternate life, reclining into a painting, is much easier, remembering too late my morning pills, freed from deciding what to wear, the bracelet permanently there—how nude is nude?

It’s made of plastic, each bead stamped out the same, but the light finds different angles through the facets; varieties of amethyst excite the painting me, elaborating details onto the canvas. I stand back to see the larger work and rest, unthinking, sit down with a cup of tea.

And the brush itself takes over, disregards the stripes, the flowers as distractions from its purpose, paints over them in layers. Settee eradicated I appear to float, my flesh ghosts into the background colour, shallow foam on sand.

My cloud of hair, approaching white, contrasts across the painting with the amethyst bracelet. Lifeline more precious than real gems it is, its metal tag shadowed at my inner wrist listing my medications, what parts of me to treat with special care.

Which lurking danger will entrap me? I could brave a few more seasons: screw the ice grip back onto my cane; into the rain or sun manage an umbrella.

My back aches, so I know I’m here reclining, my heft still flattening the towel, right hand stroking the silky roses, though by now I am invisible. Up there on the canvas, where a sky could be, remains the bracelet shaped as if around a wrist.

And so the plastic beads outlast me and the colour amethyst, last thing I may see; may it endure.

John B. Lee

Girlie Pictures

in my best friend’s basement at the back of a pressed-oak roll-top desk in a small locked drawer clicked with a key so delicate it seemed like a sliver of metal you might pluck or brush from the bed of a lathe and there, concealed under a single sheet of split balsa fragrant with soap and perfumed wax used to ease it in sliding tucked away in the bottom like adult espionage we found the well-thumbed magazine something forbidden to children a series of black & white photographs of girls and women posing in the nude their flesh grey as emolument taking on the salacious sheen of fixed images lifted from emulsion and pinned up to dry in a pornographer’s dark room skivvies on a wash-line frillies in the wind these are something, these were much but to see what the man upstairs my best friend’s father (a spy in the house of love) kept hidden away in Rosicrucian shadows surely he must never know how his only son and I snuck a peak before returning the evidence of our sinning to its hiding place but oh how our young hearts doing springtime lover’s double Dutch set to skipping in our chests

… the paper hanger’s adopted daughter

she was what my mother might have called a hard girl what with her being the first in her class to wear eye liner and lip gloss as though she were drawing the mask of a royal child of the courts of ancient Egypt and we heard rumours on the playground after the incident concerning how she’d been called upon by our first male teacher to pose as though she were a figure of interest modeling her body in art class lying full out on the oak grain of the big desk at the front of the room like a cat on a sun-warm windowsill

and then we were there in the shade of schoolyard trees in the full play of light and shadow in the green chiaroscuro of stick and leaf at summer’s end and we listened to the sweet hiss receiving the breeze as though the zephyr were saying

what was it he was thinking what must he have been thinking

instructing his young trusts to trace with graphite on paper the contours of her small hip and round shoulder like the story of darkness etched on the edge of light