‘Clara Straight Turns 100’ & ‘Zoey Chen’s ceramic lilies on my wall’
Eva J. Stuart’s work is rooted in abstract portraiture, drawing from the complexities of a religious upbringing and the quiet struggles of women in a world that refuses to see them.
Clara Straight Turns 100
The month after she turned one hundred
she was in my dream, a Chinese line drawing
of a boat in fog. I can’t see where we’re headed
but I think it’s the bend in the river at Yarrow
and we’re humming and floating.
At three years old she painted with shoe polish
on the inside of a cereal box. How the doors
of perception blew open at a kitchen table
and gave her a glimpse of something before
they blew shut. Every gesture a hope
that even the endangered—
Mead’s Milkweed
Decurrent False Aster, Geocarpon--
find a way to continue.
How to continue. Nowhere else ever
felt like Yarrow. Ask the eagles
in the winter trees by the bridge
if she is painting a disappearing world—
Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, Pondberry—
if there is time to paint the Chariton
rising over its banks, damesrocket mingling
with switchgrass, an exhalation hanging
in the cloud of dust on a gravel road
our bedrock broken to bits.
How dare I envision a last breath
a time that hasn’t arrived? We have lost
languages and prairies by the bushel
by the barrel and found ourselves wandering
a corn maze taller than our tallest children
on the Day of the Dead…
Running Buffalo Clover.
Zoey Chen’s ceramic lilies on my wall.
She sold them to me on her way to a Buddhist convent after commencement. You, too, can be a buddha, she told me. Wandering, wanting to know. Don’t cling, don’t crave.
I cling. I crave.
Someone decided this morning the pandemic was over. The evictions could begin next door.
The woman with the baby left first, carrying nothing but the baby in a car seat.
A masked woman in a sensible sedan picked her up. Caseworker who saw it coming.
Belongings become trash strewn across a weedy lawn. A loveseat under the maple out back.
A boxspring against a hydrant out front.
A shirt made in Viet Nam. Think of the story of that shirt before it even got here. Large shards of a full-length mirror. A decaying cluster of boxes that spent the night on the lawn covered with a lime green basketball jersey that says, “Nope. Not today.”
The remaining woman is left to face the property manager who clings to her clipboard. Is she in on the drug trafficking that has been going on there? Today she has slipped into I-don’t-make-the-rules mode.
The remaining woman has almost no clothes on and is sobbing that she has no one to help her, nothing but belongings gone to trash on a weedy lawn. When the green light was no longer on in the back window, when the cars stopped coming and going at odd hours, I thought she’d been arrested.
What I am holding onto. A bag of baby carrots and a dozen rolls of the boreal forest.
As the Gulf stream slows,
the jet stream wobbles. The clouds
stall. And it rains. Pours.
Monica Barron is a poet and nonfiction writer. She published Prairie Architecture, a book of poems, with Golden Antelope Press in 2020. She produces literary programs for Lesbians WriteOn and is nonfiction editor at wordpeace, a social justice writing project. Her most recent magazine publications are Sinister Wisdom and Screendoor Review. She also works as a hospice volunteer in a variety of ways.
