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Devin Leatherman

@free___writing

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Spare scraps of poetry turned collage,
All words and photos are my own.

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a poem⏬

SECRET THIRD // You Are Too Close To The Exhibit Please Step Back

She is a bit bold, dark
and she juts out bossily.
I don't know why she is a she
and I am worried it is because
I wanna talk about an object and

Woe.

I wonder if the painter of this
piece, wanted his piece lit like this.
The can lights frolicking, one amongst
them staring her dead in her center.

I think of her in her studio.
Leaned up against a dusty wall.
The light from the windows
are an even cast, glazing her surface.
Even that wanting sameness across
the shape of her. Red. Red. Red.
Cochineal.

She is a boarder, in a museum boasting
ownership of her cadmium waist. It bugs
me how they misinterpret her hue. Clearly
carmine. They want it to be earthy but
never
alive or dead.

There is music. In the divide. She is
a border. Squared off. I sit alone on a
pleated bench. Reading music theory
my little screen telling me of the joy
and sorrow a third can evoke.

But I'm here to think about this
lighting. The center fold of it.
And how it is uneven, mocking her
in a projection. She is so far and from
that tacky grit of Newman's studio air.

Right before he died, availed us of her.
I think she is the assailed but the
assailant...
I'm hoping it is the can light but I fear it is
much darker. All of us: museum, Barnett,
spotlight, nails, gravity, air, age, and the
void closing in on her.

I don't know if I like how the light
dampens
around the corners of the unframed thing.
How her shadow hangs slimly underneath
like a little sloth in a long swing. Her
secret third
dimension jutting out with a little bit of
attitude.

How she can't lie in two dimensions. How
she
can never just keep to her flat surface,
and remains
an object. Penetrating our dimension,
hautily. Oh!
And there is the long sigh of a line. They
say it is a
zip. The artist made a hundred of them.
Nuff said.

#poetry #ekphrasis #barnettnewman #abstract #expressionism #art @diadetroit

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