Jehanne Dubrow

Once I argued with Herakles about the stars. I said they were memories glinting down at us from the distance of the night. When we stood together on the porch, I knew that soon I would search for his eyes in every constellation—pinned by the sting of a scorpion’s tail or clawed at by a bear—how even in the sky his body reached for what might hurt. He was a late hour that I missed. What I meant by desire was already I could see his dead, reflected light.
 
After Anne Carson

I was an alabastron that he carved, that is to say whole, containing scented drops called story. The red cattle in the field. The little dog I loved to feed my dinner scraps. The wind in summer carrying echoes of the sea. I was a fragrant bottle. Why blame the poet that he made me porous, susceptible to cracks. One might argue it is another kind of beauty to live this long, even imperfectly and splintered on the shelf. My fractures look like branches stripped of leaves, when I am lifted to the winter light—
 
After Anne Carson

Most days I barely felt the pressure of her thoughts, how she let my brother crawl to the bed above, his fingers rubber bands against my leg. Monsters make good stories. She painted me red, as in the color of abraded skin. She gave me wings crumpled as paper. She placed in me longing for a handful of glass marbles, a cat’s-eye rolling across the floorboards of my sleep. It is strange to live in a story. My mother was always smoking in another room. Every T-shirt I wore was torn at the place of words or faded to uncertainty. That first time, when I lay on the train track with Herakles, the rails beneath us were like the length of a narrative, cold metal stretching onward and back.
 
After Anne Carson

Look. Some say I’m not an artist anymore, that it takes a camera to make the frame, a wrist or ankle bracketed by the hard eye of the lens. I would argue that wherever I glance there is a composition to be shot. Look at those ballpoint pens pin-cushioned in a cup. Look at how you sit as though a body of dried clay, and the light is asking for consent to touch your skin. Always there is chiaroscuro in my gaze. I say every room may be curtained into dark, a place the negative imprints itself on paper or, if not that, on the textured sheet of memory. What do I need of a camera. There is water running through my thoughts. There is a string that hangs across my mind—I clip a row of pictures to the line.
 
After Anne Carson