Nude in the Bathtub, 1935
“He who sings is not always happy.”
-Pierre Bonnard
Marthe in the bath we watch
Bonnard watch her (a factory
of persistence)
He embalms her
with his gaze
Think of them
in that two-level studio
sequestered circumscribed Bonnard
in furry slippers daubing
at the canvas the way
a mother (gently
purposefully) presses tissue to lips—
tissue to child’s face
We lean in the doorway
peer over Bonnard’s shoulder
It’s just us and the sound
of water running
of steam hissing
through sweating copper pipes
—
This selection comes from Patty Paine’s chapbook Feral, available from Imaginary Friend Press! Purchase your copy here!
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (forthcoming from Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor of diode poetry journal and Diode Editions. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar where she teaches writing and literature.
Andrew Koch’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bluestem, Connotation Press, Mojo, Rust + Moth, and others. Although a Tennessee-native, Andrew presently lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife and cat while teaching literature and pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University.
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