issue 7
// poetry
I Ate Art For Breakfast
by Arshee Jameel
But the meal was not gentle.
It was ochre first -
cavesmoke, the fat of hunted light
then the blue from a Byzantine virgin's throat,
licked off the brush before the paint could dry.
Marble dust sweetened the coffee.
A spoonful of bronze corrosion,
the green-black patina of a drowned saint,
lifted to my lips.
I swallowed the corner of a Rothko,
the one where red stops pretending to be a rectangle
and starts confessing to the floor.
The groan a cello makes before the bow
remembers its name.
The eighth draft, the one with the coffee ring
and the cross-outs,
the one that had the word and swallowed it.
I ate the gasp a welder makes pulling back the mask,
showers of sparks still cooling on the concrete.
The wrong note the choir swears it didn't sing,
the one that hung in the rafters anyway,
a bat of dissonance waiting for dusk.
The crack in the canvas where the fist went through.
The fist. The apology
written on the back in pencil, never sent.
The plate is empty now.
I am full of things that were not made to be consumed.
I am the gallery.
I am the kiln.
Heat.
about the author // Arshee Jameel
| Arshee Jameel is a poet and the author of The Maps We Never Drew. Her work has appeared in Monograph Magazine, The Little Things, and Poets in the Pines. A lifelong lover of literature, she has been writing poetry since her teenage years. |
Instagram: @littleandlargestories
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