Tuesday poem #199 : Klara du Plessis : The poem is its own portrait

Two egg yolks

quivering in the icebox.

Kinesthetic swag

gold coins

kept together by the thinnest

of film.

Fertile artifacts

two little dots slightly gelatinous

at this point, prick to see

thick yellow nutrition

bulge a drop from the wound.

This way they keep

for a day or two, freshness is key

to art, panting, lapping up

paint with full nouns

like an adult.

Can albumin bleach

the translucent leak

from shaking separation

back and forth plopping

into halved shells, porous white

in a bowl and then the yellows

kept intact for now.

If quick-tempered

the shells are a light way of cracking.

Method acting

your way through life.

Tempera is a technique to paint

with pigments

powders, powder the cheeks

to fill in the blanks of dermis,

powders mixed with yolks

to form a consistency

that endures.

Application has a drier

sheen than oils

a hard shellac

but a fecund being.

Imagine painting in

reproductive cell tissue

ovum mother.

The embryo hidden in a yellow halo

is just another product

of modification, mindless protein

leveled across the canvas

like an insult

to all the babies relaxed

into existence.

Klara du Plessis [photo credit: Brian Campbell] is a poet and critic residing alternately in Montreal and Cape Town. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical, was released from Anstruther Press, 2015, and a full-length collection of multilingual poems is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press. She curates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance Reading Series, and writes reviews and essays for Broken Pencil Magazine, The Montreal Review of Books, The Rusty Toque and other journals. Follow her on Twitter @ToMakePoesis

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan