Size / / /

White canvas. Layers of brief washes,

spare brushwork. Sun's rays

spotlight a girl, soft petal hands lying

in her lap, feet in a stream.

Enter the frame to join her.

Watch her lattice her fingers in her lap. Dream.

Some expressive beauty

(not like a well-turned beam

is beautiful, nor like you are beautiful,

but beautiful as the daze

of nature's chlorophyll dynamos)

hovers about the cliches

of her indistinctly rendered mouth,

cleft of thighs, pubic maze.

The artist gave her ampersands, ellipses,

subtle women's winning ways.

Sitting quietly's unbearable; you insist

on conversation. The gallery teems

with tourists in anoraks.

They leave aluminum wrappers at her feet.

Their eyes appraise,

smooth as half-drunk cream.

Her hands flutter over her body, playing

a guessing game with their gaze.




Joanne Merriam is the publisher at Upper Rubber Boot Books. She is a new American living in Nashville, having immigrated from Nova Scotia. She most recently edited Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good, and her own poetry has appeared in dozens of places including Asimov's, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and previously in Strange Horizons.
Current Issue
7 Jul 2025

i and màmá, two moons, two eclipsed suns.
Tell me, can God sing / like a katydid; cicada-bellow / for the seventeen silent years?
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland speaks with reviewers and critics Rachel Cordasco and Will McMahon about science fiction in translation.
Friday: BUG by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall 
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