Zoë Fay-Stindt
Painting in Bright Blues
In a few days, Mom will have left Connecticut
and her baby brother behind in his new incarnation:
seafoam brightening the shoreline. Across an ocean,
she’ll harvest bay leaves from Laurence’s garden
heat soup twice a day, apply for forgiveness
from the hospital, fifty-page proof of no money
of gone, baby, gone. She’s been painting in bright blues,
Mediterranean light, breaking herself out of the northeast.
This time of the year in Texas, eastern phoebes migrate
south, small turquoise or olive-chested flycatchers
flitting around the barren tree outside my window.
This time of the year, the water’s unbearably bright
and we toss everything in lemon, crown
top-thick biscuits with sliced red fruit. No matter
the season, the woodpecker drills her holes: alone,
clinging to the body she pummels. If you stand beneath her
a soft, feathery rain. It smells like another wood room,
cedar mist, where I buy propane tanks from the carpenter,
husband of the woman who raised me in that apartment
across the street from the meat shop with its deathly pink glow,
where she fed me ladyfingers despite my father’s sweet ban,
sat me in front of a dubbed Fox & Hound where I cried,
eating, and began the good work of rooting joy and misery
in the same body, fingers studded with sugar.
and her baby brother behind in his new incarnation:
seafoam brightening the shoreline. Across an ocean,
she’ll harvest bay leaves from Laurence’s garden
heat soup twice a day, apply for forgiveness
from the hospital, fifty-page proof of no money
of gone, baby, gone. She’s been painting in bright blues,
Mediterranean light, breaking herself out of the northeast.
This time of the year in Texas, eastern phoebes migrate
south, small turquoise or olive-chested flycatchers
flitting around the barren tree outside my window.
This time of the year, the water’s unbearably bright
and we toss everything in lemon, crown
top-thick biscuits with sliced red fruit. No matter
the season, the woodpecker drills her holes: alone,
clinging to the body she pummels. If you stand beneath her
a soft, feathery rain. It smells like another wood room,
cedar mist, where I buy propane tanks from the carpenter,
husband of the woman who raised me in that apartment
across the street from the meat shop with its deathly pink glow,
where she fed me ladyfingers despite my father’s sweet ban,
sat me in front of a dubbed Fox & Hound where I cried,
eating, and began the good work of rooting joy and misery
in the same body, fingers studded with sugar.
Biography
Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their poetry has appeared in museum galleries, on the radio, on the streets of small towns, in community farm newsletters, and other strange and wonderful places. Z’s work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been featured or is forthcoming in SWWIM, RHINO, Muzzle, VIDA, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. You can find her on the internet @ZoeFayStindt, or offline, somewhere, being a Real Live Human.
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