“I try / not to think about the animal / rearranged in unnatural configuration / its head visible in profile / one eye / refracting the last light it glimpsed” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Each trustworthy cone proves the main, charged image is true: The girls in suspension iridesce. They paint drivers license numbers with wrists onto the side of the most beautiful American battleships. 102 347 0603, for example. They hang like high-rise window washers. Here’s the kicker: I’m still the news. Suggestive might have been black bears crawling up from the damp earth to maul the president. Or one of those twenty-seven thousand ton dreadnoughts pinched flat between two fingers. Or an erotic tax, now that’s highly suggestive. Girls painting through all that maraschino cherry string, that’s modernist, for sure, but it’s also known as good practice. And far from suggestive. That’s just the ax we’re living in.
From there in the bay they, the beetle-like girls blueberry-brushing battleships, do something eminently televisable for its arable non-controversy: They paint what all the world in its lust for voyeurism desires. Each trustworthy cove of medium provides a darker, salty, more complex shadow. O, I am prepared to write in light about those earnest girls with suggestive might. The wire will pick up the news with watery glee. Easy clicks. Phone it in from Atlanta. Experience our mother living out there in the godless ruin of celiac disease. Strung up, afraid of girls painting their oblique dominion. Have a beer, America. Or better yet, apologize. Who reads what’s poetry for essays anyway, O, pungent painting girls?