a curious, but beautiful oddity

i am so tired of vagina metaphors, part II

here’s a first draft of a second poem on the same “erotic landscape” prompt, which I call Georgia O’Keeffe: 

Georgia O’Keeffe

i hated her work the first time i saw it

i was eight
and the flowers stared me down
like the dinosaurs we’d learned about
the week before:
grotesque,
large,
vibrant
prehistoric.

a man came in to show us art

(o! how strange it is now,
looking back, that ten years later
i would get to know his athiest daughter’s
art
very much in the biblical sense)

the reds were all too red
and he talked about how we need to learn the art of the desert because we live in the desert
in these pictures of
something so beautiful
made obscene
pornographic and distorted
brighter than the first electronic billboard
in our city
the one i sat in my windowsill at night
and cursed at with all the six bad words i knew
because it was ugly! ugly!

i hated her
and her stupid flowers
more than i hated the tastes of capers when we ordered fancy Italian
and memorizing times-tables.

now

i ‘get it’- the flowers
and i still hate them
erect stamen clitoris rising pulsing blushing petals labia majora the
metaphor
is
dead
and it was made dead by those
long,
long before you.

maybe you were on to something though
and we all read it wrong.

the skulls,
the vacancy
the hunger of the sands:

you knew cunt, Georgia

but as always
men, artists and optimists wouldn’t see that. they look for it in all the wrong and pretty
places

c. Angela L 2012