Imaginary Portrait

A warbled intonation
emanates from the speakers
of a desktop computer
collapsing distance between bodies. Your voices
shift red to you, you to red shift
back again, coloring pronouns
with late-spring birdsong
in the space of fractured narratives
composed of white noise
and what it means to be
complicated, reddish, and alive.

Imaginary Portrait

Insomnia lulls you into landscapes
where everything is as real
as everything that is imaginary
and everything is as imaginary
as everything that is real.
The difference between everythings is little
more than a coyote
staring at you before it slips
between the rows of a barbed-wire fence
on top of a prairie ridge, leaving you
with liminal after-images.

Imaginary Portrait

A purple and crimson bruise
blossoms on your left shoulder
as an apple tree loses its petals
for a mind of summer. All that is new
transforms into marks
of misguided lovers shaping themselves
into another season's aesthetic
ritual to prolong the poem
living within sex sweat
of bodies and breath of
wine-soaked mouths.

Imaginary Portrait

Overcast sky, the angle of Flat
Iron canyons, and heavy
maroon drapes cloak
a bedroom in darkness
so you cannot even see black
silhouettes of bodies moving
in the night. This absence is
a monk's cowl under which hide
bluebirds that alighted from
the heavens many poems ago
failing to reappear until now.

Imaginary Portrait

You paint a vase of roses
one hundred times over, each one
a representation of the previous painting.
Roses look less like roses
with each subsequent attempt
yet you capture the idea
of roses more thoroughly
with every new permutation
enabling the viewer to understand
what it means to be a rose
in the illimitable imagination.  

Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. His first book, Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and was published this past summer. He is the author of three chapbooks, and his writing has appeared in many journals, such as American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Quarterly West.