Joshua Petker

He paints her technichrome

Green cheek, yellow nose

                Violet eyes

Her paints her unpolished

Rough brush strokes

She is the first draft

With awkward lips and

                Sketched eyebrows

Acrylic heart peeling up from her shoulder

He is painting and imperfect lover

                With a heart on her sleeve

                                And this is the first draft

Abstraction of a woman

Dissolving into the paint around her

As if she could’ve been made from color

                That was but coming out of

                                Solution

He paints her technichrome

                Artistic suggestion of a woman

Composed of forced perspective and

The implications of inorganic lines

He is painting an imperfect lover

Divinity and canvas and simple mistakes

Paint running, lines fading, colors smudging

Woman who is only a woman

When looked at right, canvas tilted just so

Millimeters of paint

And this is the rough draft

 

He is still promising her that he

Won’t paint another

Less imperfect lover

That he

Is to enamored

To fathom changing her