Innocent X, by Will Cordeiro

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, by Francis Bacon (UK) 1953.

​Innocent X
  
That look across your own blank face
reflected in squeak-clean museum glass
 
which overlays the layering encaustic--
the meat rack stains all dripping serum
 
on harems where each blotch of light
mediates the rip in spacetime’s fabric
 
caused by this figment out of Velázquez
whose scream caesuras your amygdala:
 
a veil that figures textured absence yet
anoints each hexed accessory. Raptured
 
atom bomb—vanished seat of power,
every stroke of paint is signaling the X:
 
redaction, lover, quantum solved-for on
a treasured map. You, its vanished point.
​
Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro has work appearing or forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions. He is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer’s Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. He received his MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Will currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.