Orizuru (The Crane) -after Miki Hayakawa’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” 1939 She unfolds her origami lover, fingered tenderly into shape, from his long lifespan of wingspan, beak and neck. He emerges from her painted- paper creases, wearing their rosy clefts & flattened planes & between his eyebrows her thumbprint draws down a wide sharpened bill, a mouth diamond-cut to a cubed jaw absorbed into the blue waves of his tie. He dreams into shadow, a mirror of his origins, holding desire flat to his ruddy flesh, softening the longing to take flight, to huddle in the pale flesh of her palm.
Queer Antonietta
-after Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez, Daughter of Petrus Gonzalez, 1595, by Lavinia Montana
Bow down –
as she startles
the demon falsehoods
menacing your senses
of normality, of anomaly.
Bow down –
as she greets you
in unflinching awareness
of your fallibility,
and her grace.
Bow down –
as her visage,
that uncanny valley, nature
queered in utero,
commands your deference or
dare to stare down
into eyes pooling darkness
unfettered by lashes or brows &
your gaze will drown.
As beneath her whiskered
cheeks & rosebud mouth,
her laced & brocaded
coarsely cradled &
sturdily figured flesh,
she owns the power
of her chimeric queering.
– She is beloved.
About the author: Camille LeFevre’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Dodge, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, Bridge Eight, The Ekphrastic Review, Thin Air, and other publications. She teaches arts writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and ekphrastic writing classes online and in art galleries. She lives on the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona.