You Don’t Have To Like Braque, by Edwin Rozic

Woman with a Mandolin, by Georges Braque (France) 1910.

Glass on a Table, by Georges Braque (France) 1909-1910.

You Don’t Have To Like Braque
                                                

I see how he treats you, leaves you dis 

jointed, un hinged 

Frowning, perhaps, though your white lips are cleft by planes, and 

It is hard to tell how you feel.


You don’t have to              like Braque

Really,                     you don’t.             I know 

What a mandolin looks like    
     
                                                          and

It don’t look like that!


I too find no joy in his        browncollegeofdifficulty

hisbroke nneckof perspec

Tive, the knives and live             fruit

a throat                                         swallowing nowhere.


His love is cold thesis, a dialectic of grays, collapsing and folding, unfolding, confining you to his crumpled surfaces, bending your arms in impossible angles. He 


has placed you, parched, 

beside an undrinkable cup.


“Why not that time in Kentucky?” I hear you say.

“When we crouched in the tall grass, feeding 

the pink-tongued, butterscotch foal 

through the slats in the fence? Breathing

the wet, green summer air that curled down from the white house,

Sloped up to the blue sky, and you said that there were stars, 

Even now, behind that luminous screen.

That was a pretty picture. Why not paint that?”


I am here for you somewhere, 

a bright-eyed brown fish. I am

Emergent, if you look for me behind those rusting pipes. I will

Play this fractured instrument for you. For you, I have

a simple cup that

 
is not flat, that is not broken. We can

fill it with cold water. 

We can drink.

Edwin Rozic

Edwin Rozic received his M.A. in English Literature from DePaul University. He teaches English to people who already speak English and lives in Chicago with his wife and son and a menagerie of furry and scaled beasts. His work has been published in McSweeney's, Glimmer Train, The Matador Review, SalonZine, and after hours.

Bottle and Fishes, by Georges Braque (France). 1910-1912.