Cherries and Peaches, by Laurin Becker Macios

Still Life with Cherries and Peaches, by Paul Cézanne (France) 1885-87

​Cherries and Peaches
 
Cézanne developed a completely new way of depicting objects in space. He reinvented still lifes on the basis of their two-dimensionality, and used purely artistic means to give them depth. 
- Ulrike Becks-Malorny
 
View the cherries like a lover waking
her lover’s body /
 
                             this bowl of peaches now in profile
                             from the wrong side of the bed /
 
             the table: part here, part there, 
             no worries.
 
On the canvas self-taught,
all is as it should be, all is

as its painted in my heart.
Did I say heart? Kitsch.

But left to your imagination
is the heart’s depiction.

It's been placed in  your--
​are they capable?—hands.

Laurin Becker Macios 
​
Laurin Becker Macios is the author of Somewhere to Go, winner of the 19th annual poetry award from Elixir Press, and I Almost Was Animal, winner of the 2018 Writer’s Relief WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in [PANK], The Pinch, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in -ette review and Ibbetson Street. Her YA verse novel will be published in 2026. The former Executive Director of Mass Poetry, she earned her MFA from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship. More at laurinbeckermacios.com.