by Denise Bossarte
Haystacks
At this season the sun sets so fast I cannot follow it–Claude Monet
In Potsdam, a young woman pitched mashed potatoes
across a canvas before gluing herself to the wall
underneath, their green slick above her head
obscured the bruised light Monet spent
over a year chasing, each sun scything
canvas after canvas, with poor Blanche
focused on the distance and shadows
carting her wheelbarrow out to her father,
lost somewhere in the field each morning.
The museum’s director noted that art transcends time
and space. This act, a disruption, a desperation.
The artist witnessed the haystacks coiling into themselves
at night, silent as snow, the fog breathing on his trousers
as the light vanished, each canvas a mass of colors,
landed brushstrokes coating the ground to become something urgent,
an accumulation, a welling up.
Stay still and you begin to see its movement. Breathe.
Step back and trick yourself into coherence, into sight.
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023) and the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2(Poets of Queens, 2024). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Pleiades and elsewhere. He is the Editor in Chief of Porcupine Literary. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find him on his website www.jaredbeloff.com. IG: @Jared_W_Beloff Bluesky: @readinstead.bsky.social.
Denise Bossarte is an award-winning writer, photographer, and artist based in Texas, USA. When she’s not immersed in writing, she turns her lens to the world around her, exploring visual spaces with a keen eye for the unexpected. Her photography captures the beauty that emerges through happenstance.