Featured Poet Alina Stefanescu
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Alina Stefanescu
WHILE BEING PAINTED
(For Sue Blakshear)
The artist is an old friend, her
fingers zealous as druid oak
roots surging thick through
sidewalk cracks. She is wise
as uncut trees, more certain
with each line in the heart sap.
I compose myself on the velvet
foot-stool, my chest between your
knees, the heavy arm of a husband
girdles both shoulders. We sit and
watch, ill-poised, as she mixes oil
paints then squints at the sun of us,
smoothing down a smile.
Our first peep
at the work in progress
conceals you
beneath the tweed caps brim.
I complain that I can’t see your eyes.
That’s because he was looking down
at you, the gentle artist-friend explains.
How clever, I think,
to hide your face
behind the loving gaze.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania, raised in Alabama, and reared by the spirit of Hannah Arendt. She lives in Tuscaloosa with her partner, three unschooled children, and the ghost of an indignant philosopher goat. Her fiction is forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review. Read about Alina online at http://alina_stefanescu.typepad.com/writing/.