Predicament
by Cate McGowan
On Helen Frankenthaler’s Situation housed in the Speed Museum
I study her extensive landscape—
untreated canvas,
orchidacity, fluid brushstrokes,
the striations
an explosion, geology bombs.
Predicaments.
The palette’s plates
tremor. Seismic
gashes, faded geodes
a chiaroscuro line, quake
toward citrine & dabbed amethyst
trembling atop lapis lazuli.
With my forefinger, I poke
at the protruded slope, its toe
a hood rendered with imprecision,
scraped across the raw
linen where the artist’s
fault lines cave, lose confidence.
I delight in this crime of touching,
lean in, & purse my wet lips
to kiss the dry painting. I lick
her taut fabric.
The surface springs back,
salty & needy. Alone.
For my crime of love,
I await some alarm,
some stern guard or peeved
patron, but like Frankenthaler’s
Situation, I’m ignored
in this corner of the Speed,
unseen under a red
emergency-exit sign, invisible
as I flutter my stupid tongue.
Cate McGowan (she/her), a fiction writer, essayist, poet, and visual artist from Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of two books—a novel, These Lowly Objects, and a short story collection, True Places Never Are, which won the Moon City Press Fiction Award. McGowan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Norton’s anthology, Flash Fiction International. She serves as an associate poetry editor for jmww and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. McGowan recently completed her Ph.D. and will now commence reading every trashy novel she can find.
