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2 Poems

Karen McPherson

Apprehensions

In a broad patch of sun on the kitchen floor

she stretches her full length into luxurious

drowse. She has no idea. Her body’s doing

its work unimpeded.


I try to match her breathing, to think thought

without language: a deep unwitting.

Pleasure.


Breath to breath, eager to outflank both mind

and tongue, I’m trying to transpose myself

into sound alone. Words, dead flakes of skin

to be brushed away.


Yet they skitter, chirp, unable not to put a name

to this. I feel them nudging, trailing like, as if,

culling images I wanted sidelong, because everything

is an album with pasted corners and penciled legends.


Thinking about thinking, I’m mirrored into a distant

vanishing, clinging to frame: this damn poem.




YInMn

The chemist is intensely proud

of his most vibrant error. He didn’t invent

the color, only its material expression.

The smear across the palette colder

than Prussian, warmer than Cobalt.


And though the building blocks themselves

are shimmering, unstable, this is a blue

that will never fade.


Isn’t this what pigment is: you take some dazzling

mix of light and hue reflected only in the mind,

some deepening insight scarcely gleaned

at the very edge of the spectral, and you distill it,

spin it wildly on its helix to extract the elemental,

which can then be ground to powder, thinned to paste?


YInMn, like some divinity, its name unpronounceable,

is airier than Cyan, weightier than Steel, inkier than

the deepest water tinctures. And yet, the chemist’s shirt

is a washed-out blue, his eyes blue, too, depending

on the light.


The evening sky is fading fast, shifting, fragile,

leaching its blues along the river’s edge.


~

Note: YInMn Blue, also known as Oregon Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was accidentally discovered by Professor Mas Subramanian and his student Andrew E. Smith at Oregon State University in 2009.




Karen McPherson is a post-academic, wokeproud, elderqueer poet and literary translator. Her publications include Skein of Light (Airlie Press), Sketching Elise (Finishing Line Press), and Long for This World (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, december, and Potomac Review.

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