Art & Objecthood

I like losing my breath, Pollocking in the wind,
white as bleached coral, stiff as the wrist of a Post-Expressionist.
Expressing with all the elegance of a busted tongue depressor,
the tragic bits turpentined.
“What you see is what you see.”
Stella goes mad climbing my spine.
Smiling, certainly, uncertaining me and my paintbrush.
Our theories and intentions strike like a Stevens Sunday morning.
The names for feelings untethering.
How, if at all, does a feeling unwind?
Where, exactly, in the Marriage of Reason and Squalor are mine?
“Say so long to figuration,” shouts Stella.
“So long, figuration,” shouts everyone.
Je suis the woman in the three-piece suit,
a flat surface with paint on it, and
an object solely of their invention.

Still Life with Airstrike and Kant

About yesterday, just leave it alone.
The fish, it stinks from the head, as they say,
but not really, not in an ontological sense.
Kant would paint the feather
that’s come to rest among the dahlias
as a machete, lying in wait
for the neck of the next jungle.
But no worries, the overall impression
of a thing is not the itself,
is not the thingly-ness of the thing—
and thus utterly benign.

Without sorries, a disintegration of the truce
before it draws its first breath and opens its eyes.
That same cauldron of boiling oil
still boils for the next body,
still crazy, even after all these years.

As for sorries, take it from Monet—
the impression of remorse is not remorse
and not as soft as lilies seen through water.

Potentially, no sorries will ever be said again,
despite the receipts presented for the return of peace.
Peace, the water’s surface when the drones fly by,
the rippling, sans any notion of forgiveness.
A ceasefire, the impression of peace,
peace without the gravity of commitment.

Cindy King is the author of a book-length collection, Zoonotic, and two chapbooks, Easy Street and Lesser Birds of Paradise. Her manuscript, Fever Coat, won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2025. Her latest chapbook, Five for Nothing, will be released by Galileo Press in 2025. Cindy's work appears in Threepenny Review, The Sun, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she currently lives in Utah, where she is a professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and an editorial associate at Seneca Review and TriQuarterly.