The Ekphrastic Review: Drowning Girl is a sweeping, monumental, experimental, indefinable act of ekphrastic creativity. What is it, in your own words as the creator? Tell us how this book came into existence.

Kurt Eidsvig: I’d been thinking about writing my own version of a road adventure story, or a contemporary Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for quite some time. Basically, I hoped to create a story that followed a journey and had many side-stories and different explorations into genre. Twain does this in Finn with plays, satire, adventure, and different forms of writing. I’m a big fan of playing with forms and using different formats of language we take for granted as a vehicle for a larger story.
I’d already used Roy Lichtenstein’s art as a launching pad for a few of my own visual art projects. In one, I recreated a painting of his using X’s and O’s instead of Ben Day dots as part of a large installation and performance piece in Boston for the Fort Point Theatre Channel. In another, I used a paper hole punch, collected the remnants in an envelope, and titled it, Variations on a Theme by Roy Lichtenstein. 

But the major confluence that got Drowning Girl the book going was the curatorial placement of the Lichtenstein painting at the MoMA at the time I started writing this project. The fact that it was reflecting off the steel elevator doors and treated as an afterthought for many visitors got my creative wheels turning. Here is this absolute masterpiece of painting being ignored by people. It made me wonder about place, placement, and journeys. All of this is at the heart of the book.   

For those readers who don’t yet know you, tell us a little bit about your creative practice as a whole. You are a visual artist, poet, and writer. Connect the dots for us.

I’ve flip-flopped between visual art and writing from the time I was a child. I am fortunate to be a classically-trained artist and studied drawing—from still life to portraiture and beyond—for years in high school before training at MassArt, UMASS/Boston, and Northeastern. I lived and worked in the Fort Point Arts Community in Boston for over 10 years and have been lucky enough to be featured in numerous shows and exhibitions for my visual art.  

This connection to visual approaches informs my writing in terms of practice through my use of collage, appropriation, voice, tone, and expression in both. The use of “line” in art and “line” in writing as basic building blocks for tone, rendering, and expression isn’t lost on me. 
 
Also, I am an art historian and critic, and the language of artists is ever-present in my work. There are always parallels between visual art approaches and literary approaches, and I believe great art, whether literary or visual, takes the ultra-specific and makes it somehow universal. There is a tension between these two aims in both my writing as well as my art.   

Tell us about your interest in pop art, which fuels both your painting and poetry. How did you become interested in pop art? What kept your attention? How does this kind of art inspire your own?

I describe my own visual art (when forced to) as pop-expressionism in that it often strives to challenge the traditional reserved qualities of Pop and combine them with the emotive power of expressionists like de Kooning or Pollock. That said, I think I came to appreciate Pop late. One of the pivotal moments of looking in my visual art practice was encountering the huge James Rosenquist painting The Swimmer in the Econo-Mist at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in the 90s. That work appropriates pop imagery and does so in a very expressive narrative. 

What’s best about Pop is the common language it starts with. By using visual fodder as building blocks for works that are familiar the audience has a foothold into the work. Rather than being put off or intimidated by the trappings of high art, fine art, and the art world, a painting steeped in Pop can bring in an audience and then challenge them once they are “inside.”

I think we are all told how Shakespeare’s work was vastly popular at the time because it operated on so many levels: It was fun, funny, and approachable to contemporary audiences. But there are layers. Pop Art operates in a similar manner; it is both inviting and approachable and then nuanced and difficult upon return engagements. The longer I engage with Pop the more I see the connection between Ellsworth Kelly and what the early Pop artists were doing. 

One of the books I am currently reading is Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. I am constantly engaged with Haring. His ability to take a line and create a visual vocabulary that is distinctive, original, and steeped in layered meaning is extraordinary. He is a guide in my approach to work. 

Your approach to poetry is unusual. Can you share some of your perceptions, insights, and influences with us?

I think poetry is the concentration of music into language. In that respect, my approach includes “hearing” different uses of words and their sounds when placed against one another and/or silence. 
As with visual art, I am always looking to escape the trappings of traditional poetry and bring work to people that is inviting at first glance but rewarding on repeated engagements. People like Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara are huge influences on me. As is William Carlos Williams and his constant drive to find the music and poetry of actual American English. 

Martha Collins, Ada Limón, and Sandra Simonds are all poets who influence my work as well. But, as is apparent in Drowning Girl, the closed captioning on a muted TV, a text message, or a street sign can all spark a line, a poem, a series of poems, or a book. 

The different registers or tones of a footnote versus an exclamation, a survey response or a overheard conversation are all musical to poetry. Each is explored in Drowning Girl.    
 
How do you choose the artworks that you write about? Do they choose you? Let us into your ekphrastic experience.

I write about art a lot. I am an art critic and have been fortunate to feel invited into the greater discussion of art and art history and would like to give other people that same gift. This is something I do through words and discussions, bringing common ground and abstract revelations to a wider audience. 

To back up to the influences question: John Donne. One of the things that often happens in my writing about art is using a Donnean conceit or extended metaphor as a vehicle to bring people into the experience of looking at an artwork. 

For me, the emotional response to great art is almost impossible to put into words. So I have to try. It is like comedians who challenge themselves to write jokes about things that are impossible to joke about. I feel the same about some art: It is impossible to talk about.

These types of experiences are the ones I want to capture. Or try to. The Rothko Retrospective at the Whitney in ‘99. The John Baldessari exhibit at The Met (which I still haven’t been able to write about). When a painting or artwork “freezes” me, in that my feet are stuck to the ground, I find myself breathing through my mouth, and losing all semblance of time; those are the works I often write about.   

What were some challenges you encountered writing Drowning Girl? Were there any surprises along the way?

 The whole thing was a surprise. I had no idea I would write this book. In fact, I was very taken with the Jasper Johns paintings Tantric Detail I, Tantric Detail II and Tantric Detail III during that fateful trip to MoMA. But this book just kept bubbling out of me.  

I think the challenges were in the lines between poetry, fiction, and memoir. I had a teacher, the great Patricia Goedicke, who once told me “Never let the truth get in the way of a good poem.” This book is made up, revelatory, real, imagined, abstract, concrete, etc. 

Somewhere in the middle, I was the woman in the water. I was the Drowning Girl. I was writing and wondering when it would end. If it should continue. What was going on. 

Then one day, it was done. It finished itself. I was on the shore.  

What’s next for Kurt Eidsvig?

I’m just wrapping up a new novel that is based in magical realism, imagery, and sound. In addition, my latest series of poems is trying to extend into a book. I call them the “Artificial-AI Poems” as they are work that I don’t think a computer could write. Yet.  

On the visual art front, I’m working on a series of square pictures. These tense to try and become portraits, or mirrors, and then flex to become narratives. They combine text and pictures and seem right at home with the rest of my work. 

I’m also working on a piece of writing comparing the Rothko Chapel to the scene in Goodfellas where Eric Clapton’s "Layla" is playing and all the wiseguys end up dead. Pink Cadillacs and Rothkos; why not.  

Plus, I’m working on a sunburn. Happy End of Summer!

Thanks so much. 
 
**

Read Kurt's work in The Ekphrastic Review:

Are You There, God? It's Me, Andy
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/are-you-there-god-its-me-andy-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

The Estate of Ideas
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-estate-of-ideas-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

Porky's Obscura
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/porkys-obscura-art-week-miami-2022-nina-chanel-abney-turning-the-artworld-upside-down-at-ica-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

Sample Pages from Drowning Girl:

Weathered

If you do not face me
you will not see the holes 

distracted by my inner workings
tugging at this upright profile 

how I shoulder the fraying billowing
clattering machinery
as the storm heaves through
forges new ribs that float and reach 

while I show myself rooted
unsnarling steel 

Heather Wastie

Heather Wastie is a UK poet and musician living in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, UK where she was Writer in Residence at the Museum of Carpet in 2013. She was the Worcestershire Poet Laureate in 2015/16, and has published eight poetry collections. For more see http://wastiesspace.co.uk/

​ Molly Stark’s Statue Speaks
 
Wilmington, VT
 
"There are the Red Coats; they will be ours or tonight Molly Stark sleeps a widow."
—General John Stark at the Battle of Bennington, Aug. 16, 1777
 
No one consulted me about standing here
on Route Nine to face growling trucks, staring
bikers. In life, I never once set foot
in Vermont. Yet, since my John’s premature
prediction of my bereavement, this road
 
bears my name. Now, with John’s statue just half
a state away, shadowed by the battle’s
monument—in sight of McDonald’s and
Wal*Mart—where he and his men defended
supplies at Bennington from starving British,
 
I suppose I ought to feel closer to him
than in life when he achieved his renown
separated from me by the White and Green Mountains.
It’s odd for me to represent every frontier
bride when, today, women fight in the desert
 
beside men. The child cradled in my left arm
I understand, but why’d they give me this musket
for my right? It’s nothing like the one I used
to kill that treed bear when John was at war.
 
Toni Artuso
 
Toni Artuso (she/her/hers) is an emerging/aging trans female writer from Salem, Massachusetts. Recently retired from a 30-year career in educational publishing, she is transitioning, as well as trying to accelerate the emerging and slow down the aging. Her verse has appeared in Honeyguide Literary Magazine, which nominated one of her villanelles for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and Eclectica. X(Twitter): @TAltrina. Instagram: @tonialtrina.

An Audience with Lady Ottoline   
 
Haughty in her velvet, swagged with pearls 
abandoned, swamped in aristocracy
Lady Ottoline’s mad eyes glare at the room
she is weird as a witch and she's watching me
I came to the National Portrait Gallery
to see the faces, read their history
I came to judge, but Ottoline
stares back, she sneers, teeth clenched
and challenges my naïve belief
that I could view their two-dimensional oils 
pinned like butterflies in solitary frames
their posterity mine to occupy 
but there are more of them than me and each
is peering brazen through the windows
of my house. This gallery is theirs
I am the passing entertainment 
and Lady Ottoline Morell still audits me 
until I know my place, pay my respects
and leave her to her strange imaginings.
 
Cos Michael
 
As a child, Cos Michael’s ambitions stretched to socks that would stay up and egg and chips in a café. Since then, her career has been many and varied, but always creative. Aged 50, she was diagnosed as autistic, which brought her life into sudden focus. Her themes explore growing up and life now, from an autistic perspective, She's had poems published by The Alchemy Spoon, Wildfire Words, Atrium and the Grindstone Poetry Anthology.
​

​Corn Dark 
 
There are three of them in all, your corn paintings. We see no ears here. No silk, no fruit. Your corn is not the plant in profile, leaves ascending a stalk and topped by tassels. Your corn’s height is in the tall narrow canvas, 32 by 12 inches wide. 
 
Of the three, this is the darkest corn. Its background, the colour of red wine. An excess of wine - I imagine spilt wine on your white tablecloth. And the leaves, they’re darker. Blade shapes of dark green, almost to black, and blue. Fluid and moving, these leaves, they’re mythic versions of themselves. 
 
In this one it is night. This is night corn, corn at dusk maybe, when we see Venus rise in the sky. From across the gallery the painting is a mass of dark flame. Because leaves are nature’s flame. And in the dark, streaks of lightening, top to bottom, like we see in the heat of summer, a flash of illumination.
 
Looking down into the corn, this is a star’s perspective, the moon’s, a bird’s – some mythic star-moonbird has come down close, hovering here while we look. It’s the O’Keeffean point of view. Eccentric, intimate. You love the plant, the way it emerges from itself, the marvel of its unfurling. You’ve cropped it inside a frame and we know it goes on, beyond the visible edge.
 
You show us the plant’s darkest place, the uncoiling of growth. A mystery: leaf after glorious leaf after leaf, after leaf, again, again and again, in ceaseless succession. How? Where does it come from? What is its source? And why is our world, when we stop to look, so mesmerizingly beautiful?

​Corn #2 
 
Your “Corn,” Georgia O’Keeffe. So sleek, so sophisticated. Your corn is a green satin dress, glamour, Fifth Avenue fashion. Tall. Slender. Sinuous. Beautiful blades, narrowing to points, piercing the lavender negative space. In the museum, in secret, my body is a temple dancer in rhythm with your moves on the canvas. That green fecundity. That burgeoning life force. Same rhythm in me, same love. You see, I too have a mad passion for the corn plant. From a small farm in Ohio, summers.  An old white house with a root cellar, a raspberry patch, and sugar pie. And me running with my cousin to the field out back. I can still see the forest of corn plants, all taller than me. Still see us bending back the blades, searching for darkened silk, snapping off ears and filling brown paper sacks for supper. And you? Was it the farm in Sun Prairie? Or out at Lake George? Lake George: Those god-awful dinners with his family! And you pushing back from the table ‘cause you just couldn’t wait to paint. I heard you wanted a child, but Mr. Stieglitz said No. I don’t know what that cost you. But, Georgia O’Keeffe, you painted the corn. We have that. And the Jimson Weed and the poppies, the barns, the apples and the pears. And your pelvic bones live on forever in the broad blue sky above the desert in New Mexico.

​Corn III
 
This one’s not as tall as the other two. The same undulating movement though, the same arabesques and elongated points. The same gorgeous-ness. And a broadening. Your mythic leaf, it’s not so much about corn now—you’re playing with leaf-ness, plant-ness, natural life’s abundant and repeating effluescence. Same vantage point as the others though: a wonderfully impossible one. But then, as you said, you weren’t painting facts. You took away tassels, ears, height - all that didn’t suit your vision. These obstacles gone, we’re looking into. The way we look into a person’s face, into their eyes, to comprehend who they are. That took a long time, you said. It’s why you liked series.
                                                                                ~
I remind myself that your paintings were once shocking. At Steiglitz’s gallery they looked at your flowers and plants and saw sex, and the freakishness of a woman painter. Behold woman, she paints from the womb, some man wrote in The Dial. In your plain-spoken way, you said what they saw in your paintings wasn’t what you put there. A hundred years later, your art seems to be everywhere. (It reproduces so very well.) And so, Georgia O’Keeffe, you’ve made us see as you saw. We learned to see the small enlarged, to see sensuality exalted. To see large spaces cropped, but in their cropping, boundless. We see it now. But, back then, how did you ever keep painting in the face of it all?
                                                                                ~
I feel this painting as much as I see it. My body recognizes its rhythm. I know that unfurling. I know that movement out and away. I too am held at the center by an anchoring core. I too move from the small out into the world, into full maturity. I have new life coming while my old leaf darkens and goes back to where it came from. Back to the cloudy mystical substance you’ve painted here. You’ve caught the essence of a power I can’t name. It enters me and fills my ribcage. I confess that for me the world is animated and alive - I see spirit everywhere. I see it here. I wonder if that’s what you want me to see. 
 
Sally Miles
 
Sally Miles lives in Madison, Wisconsin, not far from the town of Sun Prairie where Georgia O’Keeffe was born. She studied linguistics, languages and language disorders, and painting and drawing. She loves interweaving writing and visual art.

So
 
everything grows I know that and I cannot tell you often enough    my friend Dalton would tell you that     dapper and sharp at 90 resilient resourceful long-time master of heavy machinery remembering even after the war which of course means the late 40s and beyond he’d be digging out giant stumps still left from the first settler clearing seventy-five and a hundred years previous each one a good day’s work at that
 
everything still grows so tell me, Ramon Fernandez, tell me if you can     symmetry of order cast aside Spring Blue-Eyed Mary gone missing with Acadian Flycatcher where can we balance this thirst to clear space open space against thick growth relentless in which an unwary unskilled person no matter the intention would certainly be lost please find them who can
 
yet here I am now considering the beadwork-style painting with every detail connecting a tapestry cerulean warbler that bird of mid and upper story shown right at the root from which everything grows as if to say here collapse perspective look across not up everything together and equal     look again can you balance all with the common the ordinary the Mourning Dove in flight at the centre a bird you once scorned until you heard the cherished Cape Dove in South Africa and thought wait a minute and the brilliant Sumac the Robin you might see first  
 
what is ordinary I think on the drive to town my bucket of bolts I can’t relinquish that old red peony the yellow flowers next to it (look them up) ah yes sulphur cinquefoil apparently invasive but lovely those plain roses single-petalled and blooming pink all at once and just once without trace of disease the plain ragged expanse of everything those tiny brown-orange Skippers that come out mid-June everywhere fluttering a few inches above crushed gravel all across all along the road crowding the pale underside of pointed at both ends skinny willow leaves (check order) Saskatoon berries Common Yellowthroat wichety wichety in the grassy thicket along the yard butterfly yellow the big one whose name I never remember (Canadian Tiger Swallowtail) flying through and over those many small ones in motion of which there are more in this warm sun than you can possibly take in and hold so even though you will soon dive back into reference material and wonder what is the pattern you must let that go     admit you must let that go and yes try to join in     breathe while you can join in    no hierarchy    join in
 
Roy Geiger
 

A former college English teacher, Roy Geiger lives in London, Ontario, and spends a lot of time on Manitoulin Island. He has volunteered on the board of several long-standing reading series, including Antler River Poetry. His short fiction has been anthologized and published in Grain, The Antigonish Review, and the temz review. ​

On Zoom. Wed. Sept. 25. 2024. 6 to 8 pm est. $35CAD/$25USD


Join us for Dali: Getting Ekphrastic with the Wild Imagination of Salvador Dali. Bring your favourite Chardonnay or a pot of tea so we can relax together while we discover and discuss the life and art of the most famous of all the surrealists. We will do some fun exercises to get us looking closer at Dali's paintings and generate a draft or two of some poems or micro fictions. This is a great chance to get playful and surreal in your writing, too.

The Green Machine 

There are no gears in this machine.
Power comes from chlorophyll and sun.
From the primordial sea comes 
jellyfish drifting upward 
to symbols making up 
the language of life 
mixing and rearranging 
a collage on canvas.
Verde, verde, verde

Like Neruda writing in green ink 
Luzajic paints with green acrylics 
And what does her green convey 
the sway, the forte, the green way 
the infinity of hope.

Mary Hood

Mary A. Hood is a retired microbiologist who was a fellow at Radcliffe and Harvard Medical School. She taught at University of West Florida. She was also a poet laureate of Pensacola, Florida. Mary has a special interest in ecology, a passion that took her to more than 50 countries. Her books include River Time: Eco Travel on the World's Rivers and Walking Seasonal Roads. She has a website of nature-based and ekphrastic poetry: https://maryahoodpoems.org/

How to Recreate Flaming June
 
Step 1: Don’t look at Mia Waterage longer than you can think, Mia Waterage. This is before cellphones, before social media, before the internet has conquered your every thought, so if you want to gaze at her face, you have to actually be close to her. Or put a Kodak disposable in front of her, and you are not about to do that. Mia Waterage lives in your neighbourhood, at the end of the block in a house that is the supersized version of your wee little bungalow, even though you have two sisters and she is an only child. During the summer, you, your sisters, and three other neighbourhood kids spend almost every day at her house, because she has the underground pool. When school is in session, she ceases to exist, because she is three grades above you, and you have other problems to deal with.
 
Step 2: Wear your Jane’s Addiction t-shirt over top your swimsuit, and pretend like it’s because you’re still juiced up from seeing them live in concert. But really it’s because you are badly sunburned, and your chest looks like old wallpaper, coming off in strips and patches. Mia has been gone for four days, visiting colleges, and you spent that time obsessively perfecting a cartwheel in your bikini. Be the only person actually swimming in the pool, doing laps as ferociously as possible so that no one can tease you about your t-shirt. Mia is floating on her alligator raft, sweaty glass of diamonds and diet soda in her manicured hand, maple syrup hair so long the ends of it slip along in the pool like seaweed. 
 
When Mia’s mother comes around with more soda and pizza rolls, take only two pizza rolls, and be proud of yourself for leaving the rest for everyone else. Work your teeth around the hard dough as the hot concrete lip of the pool burns your butt, indigo dye from your shirt drooling down your leg. Overhear Mia talking to your sister, Fran. She is still floating on her alligator raft, but now she is sitting up, talking more animatedly than you have ever seen her. She is talking about a painting she saw in one of the dorm rooms. “It was so beautiful, I feel like I heard music when I saw it. There’s this woman, right? She’s in the deepest sleep ever, on this bench outside on a balcony, with this dreamy ocean view, and you know it’s sunset because of the way the waves catch the light, and you know she’s been out there for a long while because her cheek is all flushed. She’s got her legs all curled up, kind of tucked in close, and it’s like she’s making this crescent moon shape with her body. Her dress is this brilliant color that just–” Mia makes a sound like a bomb exploding as she spreads her hands wide. “It’s the most perfect orange colour, like eating an orange creamsicle at the golden hour in summer, while standing on a rusted fire escape.”
 
“Not orange like, an orange?” Fran asks, smirking behind her sunglasses. Her body was draped over an off-white, glittering seashell.
 
“Citrus orange is a morning colour,” says Mia.
 
“But a creamsicle? That doesn’t seem right,” says Fran. “It’s the fake version of an orange, right?”
 
“I didn’t say it was the colour of an orange creamsicle, I said it was like eating one. Like if this painting had a taste it would be bright and tangy, but also creamy and vanilla-y too. It’s like when you have ice cream at the end of a summer day, when you’ve been outside for so long you feel like the sun is still glowing on your skin, and you still feel so warm even as the ice cream is cooling you down.”
 
Step 3: Voice out loud how much you want an orange creamsicle. All the girls agree (except Fran). Make plans to migrate to Wegmans. Be cool when Mia gives you a dry t-shirt, and don’t smell it until you change in the bathroom. After you put it on, realize that it’s advertising University of Syracuse. Resist the urge to shout, “Hurry up!” even though the other girls are slug-slow getting ready to walk to the grocery store, especially your little sister, Cami. Offer to give Cami a piggyback ride, and let everyone think it’s because you’re so sweet. Have her say, “Yee-haw!” as you take off at gallop.
 
Wait until you return to Mia’s house before ripping open the packaging to your creamsicle. Try not to make “yum noises” and don’t eat it too quickly. Think of Mia’s painting and try to picture her perfect colour orange.
 
Don’t give Fran a dirty look when she refuses to eat hers. “I just don’t like sweets,” she says, and remember that it’s not your job to tell everyone she’s lying. 
 
“It’s not the golden hour anyway,” says Mia. “We should have waited until after 8.”
 
Step 4: Decide to eat another orange creamsicle the next day, this time with just Mia. Wait until after dinner, just when the sun is starting to melt. At the last minute, leave her t-shirt at home, even though you’ve been meaning to give it to her. When you get to her door, holding the two creamsicles in their silly, crinkly white packaging, wipe your sweaty upper lip with your arm. When her dad opens the door, stutter pathetically as you explain why you’re back at his house so late in the evening. Feel your upper lip sweating even more. 
 
Smile when she comes downstairs, but don’t compliment her on how nice her freckled shoulder looks peeking out of her oversized shirt. Try to act like you don’t care all that much, even if all you can get out is, “Here,” as you hand her the cold treat. Join her when she laughs at how silly you’re acting, and latch on to the delighted gleam in her eyes when she realizes why you’re here at the orangest part of the day. “Let’s go up to the water tower,” she says, and you let her lead. 
 
When you sit, force yourself to be still with loose limbs, even as the wet grass seeps into your jean shorts. Listen to her talk about college. Hope she doesn’t ask you what you want to major in or anything like that because you haven’t even started high school, and you don’t want to remind her if she has forgotten how young you are. Start to feel as if she is talking you from a great height, like she is a goddess on a cloud. Accidentally let out a squawk when she touches your bare arm. “I’m so glad we’re doing this,” she says. Finally unwrap your orange creamsicle as the sky morphs into a palette of deep orange and gold. For one glorious, tangy, vanilla-scented moment, all your feelings of self-consciousness fall away, and you are simply tasting your creamsicle and beholding the magical radiance of the last light before nightfall. 
 
Step 5: Scour the neighbourhood for rusted fire escape stairs. Don’t tell your mother when you ride your bike all the way to the city, and rejoice when you finally find an old rusty staircase behind a crumbling brick building, its iron steps spiraling downward into the alleyway. Beg Fran to drive you back there that evening so that you can take a whole roll of pictures, but refuse to tell her why. Offer to give her anything she wants, and stay cool when she says, crossing her arms across her chest, “You have nothing that I want.” Remind her that you know all her secrets, like how she drove around with Carlos Vivavattine last Thursday night instead of going to the movies with Heather.
 
Step 6: When you get your rusted staircase pictures developed, tape your three favorites onto the wall. Neither the sky at golden hour nor the taste of a creamsicle can be captured on camera, but spend some time mixing paints to try to capture the colour forming in your head. Then, throw those mistakes away and be embarrassed that you ever created such amateur splooshes.
 
Create a 5X5 grid featuring a spectrum of oranges created by mixing red and yellow in various ratios, adjusting the base oranges with white and black. Stop going to Mia’s pool every day. Be brave and pencil a sleeping body shaped like a crescent moon. Start over. Study the position of your hands in the mirror. Ask Cami to put on a dress and study its creases and folds. Convince her to try on every dress she owns, and then decide that the most suitable dress is the first one she tried on. Smell the chlorine in your sister’s hair as you help her zip up the dress. Agree to go swimming with her the next day, but stay in your room, learning how to paint, instead.
 
Step 7: Finally create a painting you are halfway satisfied with. Be sure that the painting is complete the same way you know when you are finished with a run, or swimming laps. After washing your paintbrushes in the bathroom sink, slip into your bed for a nap. 
 
Forget to comb your hair when you walk over to Mia’s house to gift her the painting. Freak out when you see the outrageous shadow of your bedheaded hair. Knock on the door, but softly, and hope that no one answers. Take in the look of pity creasing Mia’s mother’s forehead when she tells you that Mia isn’t home. Present your painting as if you are delivering a package you’ve never seen before. Say, “This belongs to her,” then run away as fast as you can. 
 
Wait for Mia to come to your door to tell you how much she loves her gift. Practice the tiny, half-smile you will give her as you say, “So, you liked it. I thought you would.” Wait all summer. Resume practicing your cartwheel, but this time slather every inch of your skin with sunscreen.
 
Step 8: End up at Syracuse University, even though Mia went elsewhere. During your first week, find Mia’s painting at the college bookstore. Buy 8 posters and hang them all in your dorm room, so that you can see a Flaming June everywhere you look. Buy creamsicles for all your friends, because you don’t want to eat them by yourself. Be self-righteously surprised when your roommate requests a room transfer after living with you for only six weeks, and assume that it’s because you are openly gay. Years later, think about all those Flaming Junes, and how there was little space to hang anything else. Remember the rolled up tube in the corner of the room, still sealed. Try to guess what artwork your first roommate would’ve put up on her side of the room. Fail at looking her up online, because you only remember her by her nickname, Lolly.
 
Step 9: Speedwalk the city streets of Portland, Oregon, at night, as you try to tire your mind. Ache for sleep. Keep your head down as you walk, going over the same scenario in your mind. See yourself getting on a plane with Andy in five days, off to London where you will walk past the bronze statue of Joshua Reynolds, step inside the Royal Academy of Arts, and finally see Flaming June in person. Debate with yourself whether its ethical to go. Replay again the night Andy raised his hands, as if in surrender, swearing that he wanted nothing more than your friendship. And yet, wrestle with Andy’s age (17 years older), and the spring in his voice when he let you know the hotel room has only one bed. Concentrate on how many nights you stayed up with Andy, listening to his stories, tears in your eyes from laughing so hard. Then zero in on his anger, how he turned on that waiter one night for no reason at all. See yourself in a foreign country with a man who is more than a hundred and fifty pounds heavier than you. Pull your phone out to text Andy, and simultaneously see yourself in London once more, about to witness Sir Frederic Leighton’s actual brushstrokes. Due to a hasty, ill-fated breakup, Andy is actually your roommate, and his name is the only one on the lease. For so many reasons, it would be easier if you just went. Wonder what led Flaming June’s woman to fall asleep on the bench. Where was she coming from? Had she not been able to sleep in her own bedroom? How long had she been asleep before the painter happened upon her?
 
Put your phone back in your pocket.
 
Hear someone call your name, and question your sanity. Look up. See Mia Waterage’s face, her smile, her swan-like neck, her slender arms open for a dancing, overjoyed hug. Break apart from her embrace to look at her face once more, then pull her back into a tight squeeze. Mia Waterage. Breathe her in. She smells like sandalwood and vanilla.
 
Step 10: Let her fast words rain over you. Concentrate on what she is telling you, and ignore your wooziness. Don’t tell her about your insomnia, but admit how tired you are when she invites you back to her apartment. She lives in southeast Portland, near the posh Hawthorne district, which is just about the most incredible thing you’ve ever heard. Imagine! Two Penfielders meeting up all the way across the country. Love her convoluted story of how she ended up on the west coast, involving an acting experiment in L.A.. Worry you sound crazy when you explain your living situation. Wish she would hurry up and tell you her relationship status, even though she already has you like a kitten claw hooked onto a pant leg.
 
“I still have your painting,” she tells you. “I’ve taken it everywhere. I never got a chance to tell you how much it meant to me. I kept waiting for you to come back to the pool.”
 
Say, “I kept waiting for you to come over to my house.” Feel sick about how honest and vulnerable you are being. Reach for some levity. Say, “It was pretty rough before texting was invented.”
 
Back at her apartment, wait on her couch while she fetches your painting. Tell her she can take as long as she needs, because although you are excited that Mia Waterage loved your painting after all, think of a million other things you’d like to be reunited with, other than that thing you made at age fourteen. Remember how you didn’t know how to show where the light is coming from; remember how crowded the face was, how her wormy lips were all the way onto her chin. 
 
Automatically pull the blanket over your legs. Take in its orange color, and wonder if it was a gift, or if she bought it herself. It’s softer than you expect, like how cotton candy is supposed to feel. Catch yourself cataloguing the colour, comparing it to Flaming June’s orange. It needs rust, and also a teensy bit more mustard.
 
Step 11: Fall. You have been hovering above yourself for far too long. Fall into yourself, and feel yourself all the way to the ends of your toes, fully immersed in your skin. Let go of everything that was causing your body unease. What you need to is perfectly doable, and will take rest. Relax your muscles, slow your breathing. Sink your body a touch lower into the couch. Apperceive the moment Mia enters the room, while keeping your eyes closed, your head so blissfully resting on your bare arm. Feel how she fixes you as she adjusts the blanket, her lips brushing your forehead in a way that makes you feel flush all over. Fall deeper, then deeper still. Surrender to the gentle pull of the moment, the sweet, languid tide of sleep.
 
Jessica Dylan Miele

Jessica Dylan Miele is a writer and librarian living in Portland, Oregon. Lately she has gotten into paddle boarding. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines including Gravel, Gingerbread House, and Buckmxn Journal. You can find her on Substack @JessicaDylan.