On Work

Hard work, working hard, difficult labor, who will bear the cross of a woman sent from the garden to travail, to wail, to bear his planted seeds? Watermelons, juicy red, too heavy for their vine, umbilical to dark earth gone to brown dust--the cantaloupe sugary drips of a life that’s gone too sweet for the dogs—orange flesh left out on yellow Formica, under the gale force of fluorescent tubes.

He will use scissors ever before working in the witches-stretch-method of castor oils, there is nothing to ward away the hot end of elasticity, the button-hole rip-give of perineum, all is much thicker when you see it cut above metal of fishing buckets, the doctors’ hitch and snag, so many times on this catch-and-release.

One must rip the gut-swallowed, barbed hook and it tears just a bit too much meat out of the mouth, and it is in this moment he assures himself that the lake-trout will be somewhat stunned, recover and then swim to the depths to recuperate a couple of days, but that’s not the case, a few minutes later, the white, slacked belly showing its float upwards, the right-side fins seems paralyzed and unable to, hold to water or land and that is when she finds herself in a spin, one in which the worlds swish and cross and there is no veil—breathing, human, heaven, this side, or the other, only the in-between,

the zone, the place where artists try so hard, work so hard to get to, labor at their futile pieces, cerulean blue splashed with alizarin crimson on what were once crisp, white canvases, in an attempt to show a fevered feeling that becomes a bisque in burnt sienna, and too much effort of hand, of man, composes moss green and then, only black.

Photo Credit: David Romualdo/unsplash