Watercolor
The painter choosing watercolor has gone under. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, how long does she have before what's seen is un, so quickly must she capture her subject at rest, soft-bodied as a medusa, lucent, long-armed, adrift. Sea-blue the blue she's in, see-through the watery hues the artist gives the model she dreams is dreaming herself a girl, a bell among bells in a bloom of moon jellies until, three Mississippi, four, she'll move, which she must soon enough, move like a fugue trailing herself before the woman puts down her brush.
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- December 27, 2020
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“Watercolor” from THE VISIBLE WOMAN: by Allison Funk.
Published by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Allison Funk.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Allison Funk’s newest book of poems is The Visible Woman, published by Parlor Press. She is the author of five other books, including Wonder Rooms (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press); The Tumbling Box (C & R Press); The Knot Garden (Sheep Meadow Press); Living at the Epicenter (Northeastern University Press); and Forms of Conversion (Alice James Books). She taught for many years in the creative writing program of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
"In The Visible Woman, “with the care of a surgeon closing a wound,” Allison Funk stitches together the scars of memory, loss, and grief, reclaiming a voice and visibility against a patriarchal erasure of women. In the care of her deft hands and uncompromising vision, I find myself not stunned into silence, but startled into the desire to advocate, to speak."
—Jenny Molberg
"In the beautifully crafted, urgent poems of The Visible Woman, Allison Funk probes the layers of the conflicted self: the artist in relation to her body. Hers “is a story of how we disappear,” but like the black hole she is drawn to, which emits the “oldest, longest, lowest note in the universe,” the poet sings herself into sight."
—Cleopatra Mathis
"The exquisite poems in Allison Funk’s latest collection address the burdens and blessings of a woman’s flesh. In it, her attention moves from a child’s discomfort with a plastic Visible Woman to the brave self-exposure of a woman artist painting her own nudity. This is a collection to return to on our own body’s journey from the womb to the necessary relinquishing of the visible."
—Marjorie Stelmach
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