Unmade Bed, by Kyle Laws

Lit Défait by Eugène Delacroix, (France). 1828.

Unmade Bed                                                                         
                                                                                                                                                   
Seventeen hours slept except for dinner leave
of hotel after up and down of stairs in the metro
and the distance under pyramid of the Louvre.
 
It was the drape of sheets in Lit Défait that drew me,
the way the graphite and sparse watercolor covered
the rumple of bed, the toss and turn of night
 
trying to find one comfortable spot, how the turquoise
and peach poked from the bottom reminding of mines
in the Southwest and trees that bud but hardly ever fruit.
 
By this time Delacroix had abandoned face for texture,
the way a woman of 65 no longer examines the lines
around mouth and eyes but looks to see if there are folds
 
as she bends in the shower, hopes the sway of hips hold
so that you look to the centre, not the graying of hair
and the awkward turn of ankle after the break.

Kyle Laws
  
Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO.  Her collections include Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018); This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award).  With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.  Granted residencies in poetry from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), she is one of eight members of the Boiler House Poets who perform and study at the museum.  She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.