At the Psychiatrist’s Office Through an open door, while seated in a waiting room chair , I glimpse a partially hidden view of Starry Night magically, its thick eclipse exposes yellow sun & moon, inky blues now streaking across canvas once the colour of clinical white walls. It’s only a print. One of many Van Gogh reproductions stacked in bins in shopping malls across the country, thumb-tacked on dorm walls, or framed in the homes of aspiring corporate types with a fondness for the arts, doctors’ offices, or here, in the office of my teenage daughter’s psychiatrist. Printed posters everywhere, easy to overlook or dismiss in the rush of ubiquitous overload, not unlike breathing—forgotten—until one forgets to breathe. Look again. Thick broad brushstrokes deceptively simple until one notes the swirling complexity-- the giant fingerprints of god, the bold genius of colour gone mad This brief glimpse of a starry night escaping through an open door that will soon close to swallow my daughter and her secrets bruises my mother-heart with new tenderness. I think of my daughter’s sad lovely eyes peering through her camera’s view, recognizing beauty in a hard world, if only for a tiny starlit flicker, before the dark of night descends and we wait for a new constellation to appear. Robin Michel This poem first appeared in The Rappahhanock Review. Robin Michel’s fiction and poetry has been published in Fresh Ink VI, The Midwest Poetry Review, The Noyo River Review, The New Guard, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Star 82 Review and elsewhere.
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The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
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February 2025
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