Palenqueras de Noviembre (Ana Mercedes Hoyos; oil on canvas, 2000)

Sherry Johnson

A woman is never her dress, we might say.

In memory we might say, part of her

becoming a multi-coloured dress, or

several of them, arranged into a screen.

Time-ratcheted immobility of sickness… Sorting

the assorted details; oblivion’s white brushwork-light

filling the crevices of a lost word. Plumb in the middle of a

mid-afternoon walk to the market. The joyous

snapshotted seconds become skewed

and granulated.  All we can do then is lay our

cheeks on the frameless cloth, wonder about it a lot.

Blankly its folds in the light of the sky under

the sun, no safety net to catch us. Plantains

                               and mangos shored

/ heavy, the skin-split line in balance

against it as though a game, both play and strategy.

Precious scraps talk. To us about it

in the way the dead or poets do. Which

when it happens means it’s really worth something

Maybe cut 3 clashing sections of her dress, stretch

                       it right over the frame and hang it

on the mustard-coloured wall there, an outdoor

gallery piece and memento of the NOT-postcard

variety a painter might bring back with her, token

of these fruit market Palenqueras of Cartagena.

Sherry Johnson is the author of two books of poetry, Pale Grace and Hymns to Phenomena. Her poems have appeared in many journals, magazines and anthologies, most recently in The Malahat Review and forthcoming in CV2 and The Iowa Review. Also a film critic, her articles have appeared in Senses of Cinema, MUBI Notebook, the Swedish academic journal Film International and others.