Bucolic

Caroline Crew

First published in Salt Hill 42 (2019).

you see a portrait / with a fig leaf /
it’s not much / you ask yourself how
it feels / the folds / those green veins /
pumping / a dampening / so much
of art is masturbation / the curve of Eve’s
down-arched gaze / in the wrist /
of the painter / it is difficult to spy /
what is hidden / you look for the fruit /
the wet drop / torn apart / to reveal
seeds / did he spill seed / grow
these soft dark globes / a cosmos
of dark juice / O tendril unbounded /
are you tainted / by what you touch/
and why impose / one curve / on another /
another / a blurring blossom / see
that’s the danger / of metaphor /
a shape echoes another / but it ricochets
back / a vanity bullet

Caroline Crew is a writer, teacher and editor. She is the author of Other Girls to Burn (University of Georgia Press, 2021), which won the 2020 AWP Prize for Nonfiction selected by Alexander Chee. Her full length poetry collection, PINK MUSEUM, is out from Big Lucks, and she has written several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Kenyon Review and Conjunctions, among others.