From Eva Heisler’s book “Drawing Water”
memory:
kneeling beneath a table
trying
to cover the underside
with blue crayon
this was drawing was movement of the arm back
and forth across
pine boards / no sky
no star / arm / back blue / forth blue
□
The first broad aspect of a thing is that of color patch red like thyme
red like thistle red like nettle red like heather as a patch of red flannel
carries the first memory of old smell
to make secret blue / to make a secret blue surface
□
memory:
late afternoon, September, the smell of chalk dust,
the smell of an overripe banana
and Sam popping gum in time to “Black Magic Woman”
I saw “negative space”
saw that triangle between the curve of a hip and an arm
another triangle between spread legs
I drew the contours of an emptiness and a body emerged
the world was charged with negative space
mother’s
spatula-bearing body was an interruption in negative space
my sister, working the cherry pitter,
was a wheezing rupture in negative space
lying in bed,
the body was breach in negative space
—
This selection comes from Eva Heisler’s book Drawing Water, available from Noctuary Press! Purchase your copy here!
Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic who lived in Iceland for many years and now resides in Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press, 2013) features a series of prose poems that explore failures of translation, the materiality of voice, and the relationship of language to perception. The book-length poem Drawing Water (Noctuary Press, 2013) meditates on line (conceptual line, descriptive line, expressive line, and found line) in an attempt to rethink the poetic line. Vocabulary Landscape, a work-in progress, explores the language of landscape description; an excerpt was recently published in Asymptote.
Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.
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