Rorschachs, or Now I See How Nothing Gets Crossed Off the Sad/Hard List, by Sanna Jacobs

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 110, by Robert Motherwell (USA) 1971

Rorschachs, or Now I See How Nothing Gets Crossed Off the Sad/Hard List

​1:  Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #110 (1971)

I will not just see breasts. 
But: they’re in a mammogram, squished
between glass plates, hurting.
I can’t gauge the distance
between longing for them
and for you,
between writing
for myself and for you.

September, by Richard Serra (USA) 2001

​2:  Richard Serra, September (2001)

I will not just see a nipple.
I will not. It wouldn’t even make sense,
an aureola is more starfish than spiral
or so I recall. I like his marginalia,
a crackliness like we’d see counting down
at the movies, a messiness I’d have erased
but he let lie.  And that centre, 
that centre, how it recalls
your bite.

Untitled, by Agnes Martin (USA, b. Canada) 1965

​3:  Agnes Martin, Untitled (1965)

Start simple: clouds, a blue worth calling cobalt. 
A grid, like a quilt’s neat stitch,
which must mean something other than x times y 
or at least, Victoria Chang made me believe it 
and so, I scale the unflappable arch of my son’s 
little back at the piano and almost
forget about dying. I’m told fabric is a pliable medium, 
and wood, a forgiving one, but bodies -
bodies do not choose their own materials.
Agh, now I see it: underneath, it’s the ultrasound,
multi-focal neoplasms in all four quadrants.

Sanna Jacobs

Sanna Jacobs is a poet from Philadelphia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Columbia Review, Gyroscope Review and Book of Matches Literary Journal, and she was selected as a finalist in the Poet’s Corner 2025 Art & Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge.