Canvas - Poem By Andrea Chow

aluminum foil shimmers

against the drying acrylic

paint, chalky easter eggs

like gloves lacing my fingertips

and forearms.

I am

tabula rasa,

yeah right.

it’s fun to pretend

I am a blank slate

or a canvas just

waiting to be filled in

with checkboxes

and censuses

and DNA tests.

I am not the work of art

I am not framed or photographed

I am not finalized

and I am definitely

not on display

in a sterile white gallery in the

middle of a town,

the kind where

middle-aged women

with slanted haircuts

yell at my red-shirt cousins

behind the register at target.

I was the artist

who holds the intent locked up

within her,

who swirled colors beyond

the point of recognition -

who held her paintbrush upside down

and used the handle to dab between

yellows and pinks and

fleshy, earth browns

to mix a color

on the third dimension of the spectrum,

a transcontinental photo-phenomenon

stark against the metallic silver background

full in flavor, bright in being,

the paint that dries as it leaps off

not in contrast to the white canvas,

but to the brown hands that molded it.