THE ART MUSEUM
is a collection of stories we’ve all been told, but just keep
forgetting what they mean. A boy
and a girl walk by. They are beautiful
the way a field looks without a fence to speak for it.
They stop at a painting, Serov’s Girl with Peaches, and the boy takes
a picture of the girl posing with a hand
on her hip. She smiles like she invented this day and I
suddenly remember all the languages I’ll never learn.
It’s funny. They don’t even seem to notice the painting, how
the yellow leaves genius themselves in the glow of the morning
window, or even the peaches, or the girl. And then I hate them
for this. Why? Am I just the jealous water
and they the beautiful hunters looking down at me
for their own reflections? What would that really look like?
A school shooting and another terrorist
writing his last e-mail to another million dead bees
and another child smaller than a bird washed up dead another
night I divorce and then fall in love with a blue screen.
Why not cut our mouths open? Because we will not be eating
later. The museum walls are white as some type of mutilation.
If art is the beauty of inwardness, this mutilation always
makes me so hollow so mouth-heavy
Zachary Lundgren received his MFA in poetry from the University of South Florida and has been published in several literary magazines and reviews, including The Columbia Review, The Wisconsin Review, Clockhouse, Beecher’s Magazine, and The Louisville Review. He recently received his PhD in rhetoric and composition and teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.