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  • Frenzy of Exultations
  • Alicia Marie Brandewie (bio)

After Władysław Podkowiński’s painting by the same name

See, nothing obscene—two bodies  in profile. Compare: the matte, onyx    horse has a suggestive shadow

where the genitalia should be  obvious—stallion, easy symbol    of dominance—beneath the lustrous,

opal woman, her arrow of pubic hair  hidden by her thigh. She possesses    the painting’s only color:

her flickering, padparadscha hair.  This is the kind of woman I want    to be—unabashed,

radiant from ankle to stomach, nipple to neck.  They are a chiaroscuro—her knees,    back, and shoulders lull

while the stallion pelts saliva, eyes roving.  She defies the rampaging, his rearing    with her only motion—

her flickering hair, crossing  the line of metaphor into actual flame.    Everything—like the blood hyphen

of the stallion’s tongue, every brush  stroke, and my gaze—points to her    face, the draped lines of her closed [End Page 112]

but smiling mouth and eyes—he bucks  and bucks, making a hurricane of the background.    She remains infuriatingly at ease.

What woman hasn’t been bucked off, trampled.  And when did we take what should be open    and hide them? Like cervix, Latin for neck.

Like pleasure, French for pleasure. [End Page 113]

Alicia Marie Brandewie

Alicia Marie Brandewie won the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition, and her poems can be found in Redivider and Waccamaw.

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