You are an eight-foot painting in a gallery in Mallorca. Your stomach is swollen with creatures inside. Animals with gnashing teeth and eyes big like Muppets. Something you’d see under the microscope. Colorful. Every color of the rainbow. Things you’d find deep in the ocean where there’s no light. You’re looking at everyone right in the eye in this painting, one arm on your stomach. Deadpan.
People flock like seven-year cicadas, like tourists, like pilgrims fasting because the clock is wound and unwinding. They mouth stopwatch warnings. Cry stupid questions howareyou, howareyoufeeling? No one says the word terminal. Not doctors anyway. But stage four, INOPERABLE– orange neon blinking. In the painting the doctors are implied, a reverse ekphrasis. White coat bowties shoes squeaking in and out dancing their words like a lullaby every other Thursday while you are yellow and brown on a bed of white paper crinkling. Black Styrofoam blocks on either side of your stomach. Felt if pressed by doctor hands.
See how your mouth is an O? After Edvard Munch. Your stomach is ten times larger than your head.
Sleep is a courtesan that teases but waits to drown you finally. Lets you up after not enough. Lets up and your eyes unshutter again to the steel wire of too many violins off-key. Headlights on bright, always.
You only want for touch, vanilla hands to rub your body, almost the color of skin.
People pass, one by one, try to figure out what you’re thinking. Try to soft the hard metal taste in your mouth. Ghosts of knowing what to do.
In the painting, the horizon line and the vanishing point are key elements. They determine the perspective. See how it makes everything okay? Everything appears to meet in the distance.
