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  • That Thing You Can Never Have
  • Marie J. Carvalho (bio)

In your drawing, charcoal & nudes, a kind of death brought us to paper: my legs over your shoulders, your body over treetops, the river below frozen in strict patterns of motion. I'm thinking of you, long hours in a studio, defining one elbow: exquisite, the self both consumed & subsumed, as in love, [End Page 109] in dreams & imaginings of other loves. The body is there so we forget absence, what we can never have. At drawing's center, something canceled: the model is scratched out—was her face mine? Or not mine, unattainable, another's—am I not enough— worse, was it mine & I am too much to bear? Love's a desperate thing. I don't know what saves us, our sight or what we refuse to see. These days the self seems something lovely but fragile, drawn & redrawn like wan canvases we keep seeing, weave still showing, terrible roses painted then crossed out with crude Xs, as if to prove: I exist—then: I don't.

Marie J. Carvalho

Marie J. Carvalho studied art at Pomona College and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where she earned an MFA and a Starlin Award in poetry. She has received an INTRO award, a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Ford Foundation Fellowship in sociology. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and works as a freelance writer.

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