This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Jorja Garcia
isn’t it lovely how in boston
so many public squares are named for painters?
a conversation of oil and teeth, had succinctly and wholly.
two is an integer with rare and special properties.
haymaker and the sleeping girl and it could be us.
we could exist in any sort of communicative configuration:
contemporaries in a downtown scene, ancient two-faced gods,
a student and a magazine typist.
even a man and a woman, imagine that!
representation fails, try less representational
and okay, nose to the grindstone. lines without capture,
wide open plains of garbled brushstrokes,
rivers and bricks enough to make anyone sick.
red howls of beaches and the end of color and the end of interiority.
promises of white beans and lifestyle changes
are shoddily wrapped.
both of us swear to overcome our provincial tendency towards worship,
but maybe it’s the city that lacks a symbolic language
for accounting insurmountable ecstasy
and heartstring duties,
the weeping we do in margins,
for sitting meagerly on a tuesday afternoon
waiting for a palmful of light.
you opened your mouth one night and breathed a pearl into my ear.
a baby cried for hours but we were at the museum,
we were on the floor angling for leverage.
i’ve seen pictures of the place where you live but i know you can never take me there.
i return to the beach, i am trying
for a string of words like a phone number.
opaque and speckled like a highway.
i suspect with dread that there is nothing that cannot be made like something else.
“less representational!” a director cries somewhere.
okay. i shall try.
at the museum we saw
the john singer sargent painting that made me resolve to tell you i loved you.
really, it could’ve been a rembrandt. it could’ve been a passing cloud.
it’s an object nothing more than the one i write now.
sometimes a symbolic language is overkill.
a spoon, to gut the creature.
remove the seeds and make it gaunt, hollow, baroque,
a poem with no words. buttered toast on a plate.
we never leave the beach.
we feast on green from the hummingbirds.
somewhere in the future john singer sargent paints great beasts on a cave wall.
Charlie Coleman (he/they) is a sophomore at Barnard studying English and philosophy. His work has previously been published in ANGLES, ZENIADA, and The Sandy River Review—he is also delighted to be published in Quarto for the second time! They are passionate about new wave films, love letters, kitchen sink dramas, film photography, 60s music, and long walks around the city.