A Lesson

by Babitha Marina Justin

I began with shivering hands,  

stippling, hatching lines 

two marble-eyes –worn with wonder —  

noodle-mop for hair. 

I learned geometry in my teens. 

An egg, with a tomato one-fourth its size,  

inserted into an oval egg made a perfect face, 

I strung onion-rings girdling the torso, 

hip and waist, thrust ten faces into a  

                                                        human form.  

When I felt his skin and youthful stubble,  

rippling muscles and tender loins  

on my tongue, I tasted and traced him 

with my cryptic graphite-graphs. 

I drew him into me, he wrote me down 

into his ledger of monochrome love. 

I painted happy hues into 

my life: birthing, whoring, saving 

supplies for a scanty day; cracking 

my fingers, kneading, mixing and blending  

colours into five sub-tones – 

I made a picture-perfect me. 

The colours have a strange sense of  

soiling selves – they dry-brush 

and scumble their bristles on wet-into- 

wet boards – pouring layers of paint 

on a perfect canvas. At forty, 

 I re-drew anatomy in silence. 

I cradled my skeleton, copied  

cranium and two kohl-deep 

sockets, chipped out the nose-cartilage, 

contoured my gums and chiselled my teeth. 

Beneath my painted face,  

a skeleton smirked   

                              from its rainbow ruins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Babitha Marina Justin is an Associate Professor in English, a poet and an artist from Kerala, India. A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2018, her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals like Eclectica, Esthetic Apostle, The Paragon Press, Fulcrum, The Scriblerus, Trampset, Constellations, etc. She has published two collections of poems, Of Fireflies, Guns and the Hills (2015) and I Cook My Own Feast (2019).  

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachel Singel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville. Rachel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, and Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at Proyecto’ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Summer 2021. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public, and museum collections.