January 26 -- Jeanne Wagner

Summer Interior                                          

            by Edward Hopper

 

 

Why didn’t he paint a scene sun-kindled

and warm as the title, not this room

 

where I sit, posed like a conundrum, my

body forced into incongruent angles

 

of shame and desire: the awkward cant

of my back as it stretches from the floor

 

to the bed, my face forced downward,

hidden by a cap of pelt-black hair I tie

 

each day in a tight-fisted knot on top of

my head? My blouse a palette of icy

 

milk and mauve shadow, shown against

a pulled-off sheet that’s somehow

 

glaciated down to the floor, where I pose

as if divided into hemispheres: one

 

where the neck of my blouse casts a shady

vee inside the cleft of my breasts; the

 

other where a dark delta meets the bare

landscape of my thighs. Though I ache

 

in all the places where this posturing pulls

my body awry, I know it’s a gesture of love.

 

My skin glowing with the same ghostly light,

as all his inconsolable houses.

Winner of the 2013 Sow’s Ear Prize and the 2015 Arts & Letters Award judged by Stephen Dunn, her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and American Life in Poetry. She is the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections, The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the Steven’s Manuscript Prize and In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press. She is on the editorial board of California Quarterly.

 

Poems appeared in the following publication:

 

"Summer Interior” first published in In the Body of Our Lives, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011.