Blue Green and Brown, by ​Marianne Szlyk

Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown), by Mark Rothko (USA, b. Vitebsk Governorate), 1952.

Blue Green and Brown 

She wonders what is intimate
about an enormous canvas hung
up on a museum wall.
Museums are silent except for
garbled conversations, docents’ lectures, spills
of sound from someone’s device.
Nothing is intimate, not even
silence, the pristine space between
each person in a public place.

She sits at home with
the image on her screen,
all other lights off.  In
twilight, blue, green, and brown
envelop her, keeping her company
in this humidity.  Cicadas call
each other.  Indoor and outdoors  
blend : buses’ wheeze, the washer’s
slosh.  She feels the space
between her and them dissolve.

​Marianne Szlyk

This poem was first published in Setu.

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... , an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review, and a professor of English at Montgomery College. Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press. 

Her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking up at Trees of Heaven, is available through Kind of a Hurricane Press:  http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2014/10/listening-to-electric-cambodia-looking.html .

Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including The San Pedro River Review, Cactifur, Of/with, bird's thumb, Truck, Algebra of Owls, Setu, The Bees Are Dead, and South Florida Poetry Journal.  Two poems have received nominations for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize respectively.  Recently she was artist in residence at The Wild Word:  http://thewildword.com/artist-in-residence-marianne-szlyk/ . 

​She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/