Four on Picasso, by Grace Lynn

The Tragedy, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1903

Keeping Pace with King Lear
  
Mid jog, King Lear dips his toes in shallow
waves, sprinting past Picasso & my atrophied
legs. “Lend me a looking glass,” Lear says.
Clutching his dead daughter, Lear buckles
at the knees. In the last spoonfuls
of daylight, I pause to tap your tattered
sleeve. Curious how you veered
from hopscotch skipper with your mouth rimmed
in raspberry jam to this Shakespearean
tragedy between your parents
& you. Night cuts itself in loose
brushstrokes, blue worrying
to grey. Lear pats Picasso’s arm, bargains
with him to pour you more
absence like an empty pitcher around
the huddle of your rationed bodies.
Picasso won’t permit us to make you
baloney sandwiches or even a Sprite.
Lear halts beside me & we stare to make
a study of your sad triangle, a ventriloquist
moving with its own iron will. Brimming
with loss, you evade my eyes. How you flinch
at Picasso’s slightest touch. I place
a palm between your blades to straighten
your hunch. You’re too young
for scoliosis, for poverty, for the space
between parents to mean
anything other than open fields
of evergreen. Lear nudges me, night
winds digesting his howls.
“What’s he done at such a tender age
to arrive at this desolate place awash
in sharp elbows & faint palettes
of melancholy?” Picasso only
offers Lear a short shrug. Stopped  
in our tracks, I forget the places we were
meant to go, wanting to throttle
whoever educated you in cementing
grief in the soft features of your face,
hiding you in denuded sight. Rubbing
traces of sleep out of the corners
of my eyes, I feel your bones cave
to contain strokes that seep, secrets
bodies bow to keep. How you’ve gone
from child to vault, from rainbow
sprinkles to Lear’s vanquished life
& Picasso’s Blue Period. “You’re too young
to be slashed by tragedy,” I tell you
as if your weakness has a say. You stay
silent, absorbing the acerbity of ionically
charged air, letting me know
suffering does not idle
for us to tell it now’s the time
to ravage us clad in all
its savage rage.   
 

Three Women at the Spring, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1921

​Sorority of Stone    
  
Welcome to our sorority wrapping
a water’s spring. Walk carefully 
on the gravel terrain. We can’t disclose  
if we’re Greek or Roman, where our skin 
gives way to statue. Here is the last 
graying white tunic we saved 
for you. It’s a tripping hazard, falling
to the ankles. Our seamstress says 
her ETA is 10 minutes. While you wait,
we would offer you Snickers 
or caviar, but alas, our delta 
airline miles have expired & we chose 
to get stoned. Lot’s wife lent us 
her excess supply of weed. 
A makeup artist is en route too, adept 
at heavy-lidded eyes, fun-sizing 
mouths & nose jobs as colour washes
your blonde brown. Picasso pays well
for inside-out weight watchers, rounding  
us into heavyset monuments. In the mean-
time, I’ll take you on a tour. I don’t know
my name enough to say it, so call 
me your escort on the faraway 
right. You seem to envy my Margaux 
Hemingway brows, my wavy hair tugged 
back like a loaded gun or the unhinged 
strap of my gown mocking 
a museum exhibit of my chest. Picasso Play-
boy billboards our private 
parts. What about my bent knee, my hanging 
hand & crudely defined toes? My gaze 
slanting off into a vast unpainted 
place. You reply it’s my neighbour’s style 
you chase in her felled sheets of twilight 
hair & blocked off bottom half reminding 
you to turn off your TikTok notifications. 
Sorry, we don’t have cell service 
here. Our zip-code is automatic airplane 
mode. Beside me, the girl you look at 
looks down at how Picasso cropped her 
hand. She’s got a severe case of selective 
mutism, embarrassed at how your eyes rest 
on her breast. Picasso’s seamstress excels 
at slackening our straps so we’re always 
showcasing our nipples. It takes time 
to adjust this timeless time 
zone. You might’ve veered off 
the highway at the wrong exit, unless 
the third of us piques your interest, losing 
definition in her overstretched fabric 
or the sketched blocks of her peach-
polished feet Picasso preserved 
unfinished. Beware, he tends to do 
that with us, slipping out of bed before 
dawn to trade us in like shades 
of eyeshadow for brand new lovers 
with nothing but the incomplete cross-
sections of ourselves as ours to keep. 

Portrait of Picasso, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1947

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1906

My Darling Demon, Picasso 
 
I lose my way
in twisted kaleidoscopes
of my eyes. 
Turned one direction 
into unrequited veneration 
a hundred postcards deep.
Turned the opposite way,
my hatred has its sway.       
I cannot cease 
imagining him, flash 
forward fifty years. 21st century Picasso 
renders tender in my oven 
heated by a thousand suns.  
His two-dimensional bust sags 
into ideal decay. Baked on high, 
his masculinity emulsifies 
like ricotta into dangling breasts. 
His cleavage becomes a vase 
for a lonely daffodil. 
His tongue lolls from wrinkled lips. 
His metallic nose loops like earrings 
through empty
eye sockets. I play a Van Gogh 
on his ear to make room 
for a spiraling ram’s horn. 
Understand, I tend to lose my way
when I step forward or backward 
from the sensations I receive.  
He is Schrödinger’s cat with four lives 
in blue, rose, African and cubist
in one lifetime. I must offset 
the ram horn’s vitality with a skein of grey hair extending 
finger-like from his mouth, metamorphosing 
into a spoon to carry a lute.
See how I punctuate his hideous distortion 
with the sound I love most.         
But I build myself in golden geometries on his crown 
to shape my revolving door 
of feelings into a revolver of me, surreal slayer
of his grotesque majesty. ​

Grace Lynn

Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in Sky Island, Thimble Lit and Sheila-Na-Gig,explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and exploring absurd angles of art history.

La Vie En Cubist Rose
  
Here await Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound 
and Matisse for you to complete the pyramid
of my body. I am gravity-boned, a flesh mix-
tape of Einstein, Pythagoras and Newton’s 
cradle pitched towards you. It was never 
about how I look but how you look “for me, 
it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me 
which is always I, for me.” You see, I visited 
his studio ninety times, but Picasso bumped 
up against his short fuse: “I can't see you 
any longer when I look.” He found
primitive African and Iberian
Peninsulas of my face in its absence.
He hangs out on Tuesday afternoons
at the Louvre with ancient Spanish
sculptures to make me something new
on Earth. I am geometry gazing into
the Cubist distance pastel-ing past Renoir 
Renaissance docile femininity. Find 
nondisjunction between the chromosomes 
of my eyes, heavy-lidded edging into sleep 
or wrinkled in musings about what rosé 
to serve at my upcoming soirée. My arms 
are dumbbells on my knees. I dress in burnt 
sienna and red wine subdued tones. Picasso put 
his protractor in the acute angles of my lips
and nose, so sharp in the round hillside 
of my torso. See me trouble continuums
of time and space, cracking as I cement 
Picasso’s Rose Period. I am leaving you 
my legacy that bears no resemblance to me.