Hogan & Mines — Nov. 14

Katie Hogan and Sharain Mines traded art and words. Sharain shared this painting, “Breaking Bread,” with Katie:

In response, Katie wrote this poem:

Breaking Bread

When the waiter came back with copperware shined
with salt & vinegar, I spilled wine
on the tablecloth, watching us in the curve.
Blotting the fabric, I pictured silver birch
woods, winter-thin, nosed-open patches of grey
grass & your thin wrists were the exact
shade of a snapped-off antler.

Wanting to bring you in —
I held the bread like a curry-comb.
Fingers splayed & pressed-into.

& then the whine of knife against crust.
We must have been looking so crooked,

currant-lipped, squinting into the docile bell
curve, as though it were an overmantle mirror
in that lobby where, once, I was wearing

my lemon silk chambray — my hair
a soft brown helmet — and you were a long shadow moving
within the room but not part
of the room, the room almost filled with you, like a vial
of lake water, & illness, too,

is almost like this — stretching in its container
like a shorebird just pushing off
from a branch, its eye on our side fixed
on a beautiful fish, a lovely mouse, a brilliant cut-to-clear
glass salt shaker at the table’s
exact center, eighteen tablecloth stripes
from both the left and right
edge —

* * * * *

Katie shared this poem with Sharain:

Between Worlds

Then it was small things — slosh of a boot.
Loop of grass root, the hair
wound about the face, bare blonde eyes,
the mother’s blue skirt like a wide bell
circling the clank of shoes.
The way they all stood round with their thin lips
thin as water on a window pane – how is it
when you leave it is up to them to decide
how evil you have been
in your quiet life, in your isolated house?
Your quiet life, hues of charcoal
and lavender, tin. A bent reed.
The open piano before you a folded leaf.
And, because you hold a candle –
little yellow bruise
on the lace and barns, Wyath-yellow,
which you need,
the way Jane Eyre needed the rib-thin dog
woods slinking around if she were to really
understand him, standing in a doorway,
her hat like risen dough.

You, who have never spoken
before now, tell me it is true –
the carriage door opens. There is a glimpse
of cerulean paper. A window
through a window. You lay down
in the tawny field.
A blanket of birds folds over you.

In response, Sharain made this painting, entitled “True Reflection”: