Carolyn Oliver

three poems

Eve and Psyche Arrive for a Shift at the Mirror Factory

Once a deep pool served, or an unblinking lover.
But for looking glass I favored copper, soft to the bite.

Green under your nails. Salt and lemon unfastening each cut.

Still, a glow worth the shining.

Better obsidian snaked around corners, bronze to draw arrows
behind your back.

What shapes for silvering today?

Tyrant symmetry. No crag or shatter, shadow
of a stretched wing.

Which part of your life would you belong behind glass?

On stream-slick marble
I spilled,
unrighted.

Bend to me, the dark.
Rustle.
Lift.

I too knew the faceless, the star mist crossing anemone-eye black.

Carnelian to hematite
my feet in morning, the glory
of the glossy floors, their cabochons unbruised
thoraxes.

The echoes of my praise winding along the fruited boundary—

—and all the while he watches you, waiting for your faith to fail.

Love, you mean.

Who else?

Gives you the world to wander.

Eve Grinds Pigments for Artemisia Gentileschi

The apricot lost its honeyed glow, the nettle
its hollow sting, the first time I held lapis.

And did you ever contemplate crushing such a prize?

Only as often as I’ve wanted to dissolve.

Mind you don’t miss under your nails. Finer than gold
is ultramarine—

—saved for the Virgin, I know,
though there’s not so much here for a stitch in her hem.

A stifled sigh’s still
a breath. Sum them,
make a life.

And what colors would you add for a bruise-pestled palm?

Bloodstone. Cinnabar. Mountain ochre.
If given a choice.
Tell me the first color
you remember
as color.

Opulence, pulling in all directions.

Tearing, I’d wager. I forgot,
no childhood.

For you: gold tested between teeth.

Between the bed and the door, morning
in warm winter.

Malachite next. A garden for the beheld?

A garden? No. A first
field, for a severed head.

Eve Condoles with the Rokeby Venus after the Suffragette Slashing

She wanted you seen and unseen.

I’ve always been easily covered.

Bedclothes and fig leaves—

Ad nauseam. That painter obscured the real
origine du monde, cut me
right out of my life. I could have been
promenading along the battlefield,
admiring my children, being born.

And her cuts?

Like a lover’s scratches, more Mars than Vulcan.
Not burning—opening.

A long time, since the last touch.

I like to feel the air inside my shoulders. Breathing
room so sharp and clean it’s easier to read
what he did to my face.

But they always manage to stitch their fantasies together—

—we are so very useful.

CUT TO:

INT. APARTMENT – NIGHT

The Spanish court, seventeenth century. Red walls, pristine floors. Candles, two figures sweltering. A LORD gazes at the Venus hung over the mantel. Seated in a gilded chair, watching him linger over the painted flesh, a LADY worries a seed pearl on her elaborate stomacher. She raises her hand to her carmine lips.

LADY:

My—

She vomits through her fingers, onto the embroidered hem of her azure gown.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. She is also the author of three chapbooks: Mirror Factory (Bone and Ink Press, 2022), Dearling (dancing girl press, 2022), and Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming 2023). Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Her website is carolynoliver.net.