Barbara Westwood Diehl

Postcard from a Museum of Art

 
This museum is filled with works of art guarded by people in
uniforms who ensure your distance. As does this postcard. As the
postcard’s recipient, you will know that I am likely safe. And
likely far from you.

You will not see evidence of brushwork on this postcard. How, in a
tilt of light, the bristles leave scratches. How, in the painting of a
white gardenia, a honeybee is a sting of yellow on a soft petal. 

You may not notice how the canvas shows through in places. The
blank where we began. Before the mixing of linseed oil and
thinning of pigment. Before the varnish.

I picture you holding this postcard of a painting in a museum in a
city where you have never been. Adding it to the evidence of us. I
picture you picturing me in stills from a security camera in the
museum.

Where I stand still as a pencil sketch of myself. Where I am a still
life of the still living. Where I am a landscape with a broken fence
in a gilt frame. Where I am a perspective drawing with vanishing
points.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding and senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Per Contra, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Raleigh Review, Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Five South, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Also, a poem in The TELEPHONE Project.