Julia Istomina
The Painters
Negative Capability
Dark Energy
Atom
The Painters
Yesterday the painters came to town and
overthrew our backyard government – splashed
ochre like white on brown rice, tripled
the balance of the faint blue ridges of our
porch, but the electric blue and green grapes
they left for the maintenance committee
to decide. Painters! You used to be Van
Gogh but now wet from an outback
shit storm. Like double agents you form
quick bonds with leafy women who root
themselves in stables and village inns,
but beyond their swaying birch arms the
calluses grow thick in the weeds. No one
needs a stump. When God decreed all
is beautiful when left to its own graces,
I milked your bags of pollen residue and
counted the ingredients in paint – so far
removed from cavemen overtures of red
berry or dandelion yellow, you can’t even
look me in the face to answer lead?
Negative Capability
“You know how powerfully we are moved by causes other than
love of beauty.”
- Czeslaw Milosz “Framing”
The rain may come today but the agnostic seeker knows
what’s best.
His high forehead, impish ears, an insipidness of movement never
fails to fall out of earshot for the proclamation
that Jesus comes today
to the bay area convention, relying on the goodwill of Holiday
Inn and their scrumptious biscuits, even God doesn’t
know what goes into them. Besides the fact that our agnostic
principles have thoroughly scoured
the ability to look beyond today, Nietzsche promised us
a better life if we only acknowledge that we dream to dream and eat
to sleep; oh, Nietzsche spoke yesterday.
We knew it would happen,
how can such a thoughtful guy ever stay away too long?
To a dulled audience, in anticipation of the greater messiah.
I’m happy Jesus is coming, with crew loafers on loan. He has many
favors to cash in. He will be a new king, a president of the United
Nations, we could shoot him into space, and you know, let him do his business.
However Jesus died we won’t speak of,
it is not proper manner and the line for autographs alone will kick
any old dog question to the curb.
But Nietzsche, who twiddles his thumb and can’t stand up
for himself given his heavy anti-Christ books,
looks for a comforting soul and finds a stripper by the name of Harriet
who strangely reminds him of Alexander Graham Bell.
He asks her if she has a dancing
star. She answers that she desperately wants to be one. The kind
Vegas billboards proclaim the next messiah of sexiness.
This calms Nietzsche to such a surprising
extent, he can’t perform in bed. Harriet, or “Loxie” leaves, but on a good
note. He explains to her the origins of Dionysus, how she’s a honey
bee in need of flower, or a dancing
particle of pollen. She collects his convention
payment and fruitfully multiplies her breasts.
Upon leaving, Nietzsche decrees himself forsaken, and can finally sip
a margarita on the coast and listen to the waves
without the sheepish itch of thoughts loading in like an oil tankard
mucking its own heft.
Dark Energy
The overtly bathed world rose in a clout
of riveted earth today as granted misgivings,
dark energy, illustrated our reliance on the sun.
My father and I stood watching pulsating
Cepheid stars slick their light on nearby galaxies,
not much saying, but the distancing of space.
My father never taught me science, there being
so much of it in the world. And I as a creative
mind could have no potential consuming chemical
reactions and their intent for my body, salacious
and capacious, ball red as a supernova which dwells
a little long this morning, like a cat’s eye in heat or
a vein that has affixed itself to front and center of a
cloudy eye. Kandinsky. Simple as that, the oracles
of scientific knowledge promulgate beauty and art, the
most simple and complex of our stargazing myths and
repetitions of vernacular physics, this moves that and I move
with it along. My father and I created a jargon language.
Keep to it, willing only to shelve ourselves in a predetermined
array of extrasolar theories, cosmic birthing, butterflies, the flapping
of a fan that might fall just as heavy as lead, if only for the holes.
Atom
There are many things we could split
What can we split?
How about an atom, much like amenable light
or air that distills, greater than duplicitous,
an orangutan orange or a blood yellow, even
naked blue in the crevices of tufted stones.
You are alone in the ache of splitting
minerals swim yet zealously cling to
the bloodstream, an unbelievable regard
for human composition. Like take your lips slid
upon a drinking straw and drained the nectar
from a still water glass in glow of pooling
presentation, still art
what can we do with it? There are many
human folds on the lawn flopping bellies
against the grain of green while an atom
catches sun wink that was meant for
a bathing beauty in Greek spoils;
You’ve always clung to scenic roils.
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 Born in Moscow in 1983, Julia Istomina moved to the United States right before the fall of Communism (1990) because of a rare study-abroad opportunity presented to her father.
Istomina began writing poetry at 12 years old, and was further encouraged in the ninth grade by an ex-con English professor. She studied contemporary and Australian poetry with John Kinsella at Kenyon College, where she first became aware of the political insinuations of utilizing particular forms and words in writing. She is on the verge of completing a Poetry MFA at the New School. Her poetry and translations have appeared in Strand Magazine (UK), Big Bridge , the Bathyspheric Review, DMQ Review, Plum Ruby Review, Shampoo Poetry,Pudding Magazine, Los international Journal of Poesy and Art, Cortland Review and the upcoming Salt International Journal, V, 17.2.
Copyright ©2006 by Julia Istomina and Green Integer.
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