Bonnie Jill Emanuel

IN THE SQUALL I THINK WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK IS A JACKSON POLLOCK

                                       After “Mural” (1943)

1

A whiteout
          all shiny perfect

& a fatal plague.

Then would come another.

2

          I circle the square
          with what’s left
          of my heart
              winter blue cold
          falling through me.

          People look
     like the squall itself
                    dark slants this way
         & that.

   People
doing what they can
         in their knife bodies
& long coats

  a frenzy of bags
  loaves of bread
  bottles of velvety things

                    splotch of yellow here
         blood-orange there.

         One guy stopped-
                     cold flicks a lighter

cigarette arrowing
         from his thin
         frown mouth.

                                   Trace of crows
                                         blur into milky white
                                          arch      & vanish.

3

         I once loved a painting so much
         I think I’m trying to tell you
         about dancers in a casein grave
         alive & perishing at once.



stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/collections/american-art-1900-1980/jackson-pollock/



Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Laurel Review, Ruminate, SWWIM, Love’s Executive Order and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York, where she was awarded the Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Creative Writing and the Stark Poetry Prize.

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Fall 2021