Girl Woman
(Inspired by Pablo Picasso's Girl In A Chemise)

He angles her against the window’s smudge,
nudges her jaw sideways. Comme ça. She tires
of tracking the cracked texture of the wall
while she listens to his brushes
flickering like moth’s wings over the canvas.

She fights the habitual flutter of her hands
to hide her chin, stares as her shadow
lengthens on the floorboards. Soon, she will float
up the cobbled street, clutching her francs,
and meet Jean Luc by the fountain.

Behind the bunched muslin her nipples quiver
to points. She, coaxed by Jean Luc’s loud voice,
will tumble laughing onto his rough mattress –
it will happen tonight after the good Bordeaux.

The painter’s oils deliver the trembling cocoon
of the girl, the woman’s shadow within.

First appeared in the Great Blue Beacon, March 2004



Woman As Bench

A man sits on a bench, reading a paper.
The man is fat.
The plank seat hollows out like a cat
shrinking from a coarse touch.
The paper lies flat.

That bench is a woman.
The wrought iron feet are her knees and her knuckles
but her back's only wooden and see how it buckles.

He pokes fun at her because she doesn’t dare
to be his companion as well as his chair.
He leaves once he's finished the paper,
except when her back breaks,
which he does find surprising.
Then he says, without apologizing,
"You should have been able to take that."

The woman crumples.

First appeared in X-Connect e-zine, 1996