Model
 
She could be any woman. She knows that I do not want to know her. Her silence is sweeter than a violin. All I want to do is paint her. Paint her dark eyes. Seize her bright lips. Sweep her flesh across the canvas. I want to paint her like a Madonna with an infant Christ. Catch the beauty of pale skin on bristles. Watch oils and pigments toss light.   
​
I do not want to know her body aches. I do not care if her back aches and tilting her head in a three quarter pose makes her wince. I want to own her skin, flesh, and dark eyes that stare back. Her eyes haunt my dreams. I can only paint her like a master in my dreams. This mirror, my flat canvas of life,  does not lie. How many layers of truth fill a canvas?  If only I could paint with my eyes instead of a fumbling hand.  
  
I do not want to hear her voice. I cannot hear its sensual lilt and soft moans. All I want is the sweep of the brush, stroking her body and flesh onto the canvas. Breathe life into her figure. Body, breasts, legs splash across my canvas as if her life, her soul, and image could dwell in its surface.  

Once I thought she sat next to me in church. She wore a black dress. A black hat and veil pulled aside to reveal her face. She gave a slight smile.  

**

Self-Portrait
 
There is something more to know about my face. What image that lies behind my face, my sketch, and my charcoaled hair. The lines are rough in the sketch over a decade old. My face once smooth and wrinkle free as the paper’s surface.  

Once I wanted to forget the naming of my eyes, nose, and mouth. I followed the curves of my nose and  penumbra of my upper lip. My hair was jet black, not streaked with sliver strands of wisdom.  The wisdom I am still waiting for. Her eyes are not alive, the vacant stare emanating from a flat surface.  

Who is this shy ghost sketched in? It is not me. Even now my face is more lovely than the drawing who has not aged. Her eyebrows higher and thicker than mine fake surprise. Her nose retraced over and over again. Erased and redrawn like the past.

**
 
Fear
 
I no longer want the scent of paint and turpentine, sweeps of cobalt blues, and red glint. I dip the brush over and over in some ritual. My hand trembles. My hunger fades after staring at the model’s eyes, mouth, and body for hours. A tiger dies under the heat of passion. I cannot paint what I see.     
  
Is this some strange confession?  Truth as haunting as forgetting how to write my name in Chinese.  The shame of forgetting strokes of wet ink. Sleek strokes grow harsher with memories.  

Staring into the mirror, I cannot sketch my face into a two dimensional twin. The eyes, nose, and mouth tremble with what I seize—an intense gaze and nothing more.

**
 
To Georgia O’Keeffe
 
I cannot escape the voice of your flowers. Head of the orchid, its petals spread silken folds like another galaxy. An egg cracks to share its yolk. Each flower, each stroke of paint sweeps into a constellation. A small world reflected in the eyes of flies and bees. This world is more than pollination or casual sex. Bees hover in their world until they touch mine.   
I fear your flowers. The heads, secret whispers, cascade of petals swirling into another nebula, each blossom unfolding into a new world, a new life. White trumpet, poppies, and calla lilies carry their own colour, own song. Voices more resonant than a thin soprano’s voice cracking the air.  

** 
 
Boxes                                                         
 
I knock. Sometimes you won’t answer. Sometimes you crack open the door and peak out with matted hair. Your dim eyes long to nestle in the pillow clouds and blankets still warm from your naps.  

Another crash of a computer program. Another day without research.   
 
Six years have passed. You still won’t leave this dorm. Your shadowed view overlooks a  dumpster; the scent of trash and darkened cabbage drifts through your window. Sunlight barely filters in.  Cardboard boxes stack in walls around your narrow bed and desk. Boxes crammed with the past: climbing ropes, sleeping bags, cameras, worn photographs where my fingers still linger. Towels and shirts lounge on a bicycle. Somewhere lurks the yellowed pages of your dissertation.  
  
I want to kiss. You wince and crumple in faded jeans onto the bed. You want the girls who whisper every day and night in sweetened e-mails. Glowing white words sweep across a black sky.  

*

This poem first appeared in Loch Raven Review.

**
 
Picking Dandelions
 
All I can recall is the scent of my mother and her carrying me onto a large field of grass and bursts of dandelions. Bright yellow blooms she picks for me.  I pick for her.  Isn’t this what love is all about? We keep picking and weaving them into necklaces around our necks and around our heads. I place a few blossoms in my mouth. I spit out the bitterness.  Every morning and every afternoon we go to the green grass and pick dandelions. Sometimes clovers.  We always count the leaves wanting more than three, never finding four. Sometimes we pick fluffy white dandelions. We blow the seeds swirling into the wind. Sometimes my mother tells me that it is good luck to blow them far away until they settle and grow another field of dandelions. Sometimes she tells me that this is the meaning of life and dreams before I go to bed. Every evening I see the white seeds turn into the stars, the galaxy of stars where she points out the North Star and the Big Dipper.  The whirl of stars blaze in my dreams at night until I am no longer alone. Until I no longer need to cry out for her. Until I can sleep through the night, and I know the difference between sleeping, dreaming, and the vivid blaze of real life.  

**

Deborah Chow Strozier is a Chinese American Poet. She is working on an ekphrastic chapbook. She won second place in the Salon 2008 Chapbook Competition for Lotus Leaves, published by Pudding House. Poetry was published in The Bitter Oleander, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Cricket Magazine, Ibbettson Street Press, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Poetry is forthcoming in OSU Urban Arts Space Artist Commune Journal Issue Two. She served as the Vice-President of the Ohio Poetry Association (OPA). She is starting an ekphrastic poetry program for OPA. She has worked 25 years as a Research Scientist at an international nutritional food company.
 

​The Envelope Please
 
Although I strive for randomness, shuffling and shuffling again, I know there are only two options in the envelope: Mrs. Peacock, who had castrated me years ago; or Colonel Mustard, that arrogant old prick, leering his judgment in monocle and jodhpurs. I often think of others, at home playing their own game, their envelopes filled with the arrogant erudition of Professor Plum, the predatory capitalism of Mr. Green—or if you’re into the whole MILF thing, the psychic trauma of sultry Miss Scarlet—and wonder if they, too, find this a flawed game.
 
The floor plan, for example, is quite ridiculous. A conservatory? Just what do they think they’re “conserving”? And if their commitment is so firm as to require an earmarked room for their efforts, why the secret passage to the lounge? The floor plan is also incomplete. It feels like this house should have a torture chamber. Or at the very least, a den of iniquity. Where are they supposed to hold the orgies? The ballroom seems too formal; the billiard room too cramped (and, believe me, getting stains out of felt is a real chore).
 
I have written several times to the people at Hasbro, suggesting updates. Why not, for example, modernize the weapons catalog, replacing the candlestick—I mean, does anyone even light candles anymore—with, say, a chainsaw, a flamethrower, or disapproval. The possibilities are limitless. Think of the enveloped elegance of Mrs. Peacock wielding narcissism, or the dreaded Colonel his preference for prepubescence. And they already have blunt-force-trauma covered with the wrench and the lead pipe. Why the overkill? The people at Hasbro have not, to date, responded.
 
Another rainy day. Another solitary game of Clue. I play by memory, for the rule book is always the first thing lost. The box says the game is for 2-6 players, but when we play for real, we play alone.

**

Pills

after Louis Jenkins
 
“they just make you feel better overall.”
 
Jenkins declares his preference for the large brown ones (although he admits he still takes the little yellow ones too), and The Matrix offers us a choice between the red one and the blue one—a false choice in this undeniably purple world. The green ones are nice. As are the pink ones. The black ones help recalibrate a soul too beguiled by platitudes. But almost no one ever mentions the oranges ones, which is a shame when you think of it. The white ones are too boring to mention, so I won’t, although I just did, which may tell you everything you need to know about this world of ours. The lavender ones, the turquoise and the vermillion all have their merits, although fans of these tend to overstate them, creating cults of color chiasmus. But please don’t get me started on the chartreuse ones, the cyan, or—God forbid!!—the puce, those colors we claim to know but fail to recognize out in the shrinking sensory world. Or perhaps, like the “banana” flavor used in candy, those colors don’t really exist in the natural world, are just another supplanting creation. I should point out merely in passing that penguins worship no pills at all and look how happy they are. Sliding down ice floes into the cold, blithe water. I bet they cry “Weeeeeee” in Penguin as they do. I bet they have long since stopped dreaming of flight. Grace Slick has told us of pills that make us larger, others that make us small, but she never mentions their color, so those claims remain highly doubtful. With all due respect, let us stick to this kaleidoscopic pharmacopeia that we worship with such levelled ceremony in the hopes something will fix what we’ve been told was broken, side-effects be damned and never mind the small print.

**

New Briefcase
 
By calling it that, I’m giving away my age, of course. Such terms are not used anymore. The Age of Briefs has ended. But “computer bag” seems too casually commercial, suggests this is nothing more than a temporary vessel (which, of course, it is), something used merely to transport a more valuable product from Point A to Point B, rather than a thing which gives witness. Or at least a thing which allows other things to give witness. In this sense, it is almost like an angel, or a Tomahawk missile, a foghorn or a dictionary.
 
Given my chosen career, it will become almost an appendage, a faux body part I take off each night and put on again each morning. Like a toupee. The only difference is, this does not cover a shame. Or, it covers a different shame.
 
This new one is made of canvas. I like the way it feels bouncing off my hip as I walk. Like an uncle I just met telling me I done good. It has a zipper and two straps with buckles. This means that compared to the old one it’s replacing, which just had the zipper, it takes longer to open and to close. The extra steps make a ceremony of leaving, as it should be.
 
I suppose by the same logic it would make a ceremony of arriving. But that, I cannot speak to just yet; there is still a bit of road, graveled half-path; still the hazy outline of Point B off in the distance, just beyond the empty lighthouse and the jagged coastline it sentinels. 

 **

The Sad Life of Cereal Bowls
 
Most of their lives are spent in closed-cabinet darkness, stacked atop one another in kiln-fired silence, pulled out only for lazy breakfasts, when eggs or bacon or even the finger-press ease  of Pop-Tarts seem too much effort. Selected in reverse order of a days-ago washing, they do nothing but sit and wait and mourn their casual codified label. Surely, they could hold something else, warm soup on a late October day, perhaps; or a collection of nuts set out for company—Brazilians. Almonds. Maybe Macadamia. Or even the relevant candies of our parsed-out holidays. 
 
But no, these are only cereal bowls. Called once such in the long ago, the label sticks, becomes fixed by cambered habit, and forever after, that’s how they’re known and that’s all they can ever be.

**
​
Love Poem
 
There are two ducks swimming in the small pond at the park. Mallards. One green head. The other, not. It does not matter how they got there. Whether together or separate. They are there now, swimming in the small pond at the park. It’s not even a real pond, actually. It’s just a depression in the mild hill separating the two halves of the park. It frequently fills with rain water, so it often appears to be a small pond. But it’s not. A negligence of trash outlines the sparse wet border. Bomb-shot bottles of bright green and purple. Empty. Foil Cheetos bag. Flaming Hot. The water in this not-a-pond the color of a child’s bath. There’s enough water today for the ducks to float, thinking duck thoughts. There was enough water yesterday too. And enough to reflect moonlight in the dark hours between. It seems fair, based on weather reports, to assume the water (and thus the ducks) will be there tomorrow as well. But that is yet to be determined. What can be determined, what we can say with unqualified certainty (with all appropriate apologies to Plato) is that right now there are two ducks swimming in the small pond at the park.
 
**
 
I Was Going to Buy a Wok Today
 
I was going to buy a wok today. I’ve been thinking of doing this for some time now. Been without one for over four years. Ex-wife got my old, tried and true one in the settlement. Been getting by with a common skillet, which works for searing a sirloin or for the ceremony of chicken in a tomato-basil sauce, but cannot return me to the days of pad thai or Szechuan pork.
 
But then I thought you might already have one. Seemed silly to double up on something that takes up so much cabinet space. True, we could get one of those hangy things that are like indoor wind chimes, but where you have to make your own wind, which, with these things, means banging your head against one of the dangling pans with sufficient force to make it collide with another and so on. 
 
But then we’d have a collection of pans randomly slamming into one another, creating such cacophony. And that would make it hard for me to read you the poem I wrote about you today. Best we make do with your cabinet space, limited though it may be.
 
And there are so many things you may or may not already have, so please forgive me if I spend some time in our early moments looking around your place, taking note of all things newly important, looking for any gaps I can eagerly fill, any strange object, perhaps in the back of the medicine cabinet or maybe in the hallway linen closet, that I’ll ask you to teach me about. In the full flush of this excitement of gap-discovering and strange-object-learning, there may be more important things to do than buying a wok today.
 
So I bought some Tupperware instead. We can never have enough Tupperware.

**

Paul Juhasz is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated author of six books, including four collections of poetry: Ronin: Mostly Prose Poems, a finalist for the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award, The Inner Life of Comics, The Fires of Heraclitus, a finalists for the 2025 Oklahoma Book Award, and his most recent collection of poetry, Katabasis, (Turning Plow Press, 20206) has been nominated for The National Book Award. He served as curator and coordinator of the Woody Guthrie Poets from 2020-2024, and currently lives in Oklahoma City.
 

 
Who Will You Be?
 
You think you only get one set of eyes? I sport a dozen faces. My breasts are succulent, manifold. I have told you too much. When the sky turned silver I told you two secrets. At midnight I lay your ear on my chest. At dawn I will tell you more. Every stone dies. Today, I’m an open mussel assailed by saltwater. Tomorrow, I’ll be roots for the billowing dawn.
 
 **

Standing beside my little free library, Michelangelo
 
is not too pleased I'm giving away the book about him I got for my bat mitzvah. At thirteen I hated gold bracelets, opened my arms to art. What that says about my soul doesn’t interest him. Or so it seems as he shakes his scruffy beard and pouts. I haven’t looked at those black and white photos in years, I don’t say. I know as much as I’m going to know about God reaching out his hand. I don’t say that either, and frankly, I hope it’s not true. I have a lot of rocks to turn over still. At the shore, I’ve found crabs tiny and alive, red squishy sea anemones and in the forests, the smell of forests. You’re gorgeous, I say. 
 
**
 
Every time I read Those Winter Sundays
 
and I have read it a lot, I fall in love with permission to throw up my hands and not know and know I don’t know. At twenty-six, I was supposed to know everything, even how to teach silence, love. My students knew love’s austere and lonely offices, pulled their desks together. Today, I find myself caught on cracked hands. Mine so ridiculously soft. Once, I dug a small hole and put the roots of a carrot in. It died because I did not dig deep enough. I have not dug a grave for a beloved dog or for myself before the Nazis shoot me down. Is it cheating to mention Nazis? I think there are a list of things that are cheating: God, Nazis, maybe even bees and the sun. I think about all these things a lot. Would I have just refused and died? Dug in the sun and died? Run and died? We only get stories from survivors. One wrote a poem the whole camp chanted on the way to the work detail. It was a love poem.
 
**
 
In This Version of the Break-up, We Break-up 
 
You decide now, before the ache like a cracked nose, that you won’t love me. In this version, I don’t bang other men, I mean I do, but you have no say. We’re broken up. We don’t travel through gelato, slow tongue curling bites at the end of the world. When I laugh like a twenty-two, you don’t freeze, a light brown rabbit in the dusk.
 
*

This was previously published in The Prose Poem.
 
**

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, Only Poems, and Grist among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honourable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.