Feature > Poetry

Marta Ferguson

Marta Ferguson is the co-editor, with Bryan D. Dietrich, of Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press, 2014) and the author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett (Main Street Rag, 2005). She is on staff at Spark Wheel Press as a manuscript reader and is the sole proprietor of Wordhound Writing & Editing Services, LLC.

Boundaries

—after Helen Frankenthaler's Monoscape, 1969

She wanted just the art, not the artist.

An erasure of that presence, so ennobled
by her male contemporaries, busy spilling
themselves across cotton duck they unrolled
on mine-is-bigger warehouse floors.

A precise stain on the sailcloth, instead, which led
to another, another, to mark where there had always
been the painting, waiting. Its richly soaked hues,
pink and purple, rust and blue, an inevitability.

Its softness, like melted wax, an illusion. Each shape
discreet, each edge calibrated to blend or break.
Perhaps a range of mountains, a cloudy sunrise.
No lines or shadows to reassure. Only form and color.

Perceptual depth unsettled, everything could shift,
push and pull, nothing even as solid as it appeared.
The painting now a live thing, breathing, on its own.