BECOMING STILL-LIFE IN ST. LOUIS
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
after Laura Letinsky’s “Untitled #49”
April’s final Saturday spent circling
museum halls. Photograph of rotting
peaches, shutter-captured intimations—
open mouths, juice-slicked hands, parted
flesh. A knife. That spring I sate myself
on gallery fruit and floating cups, tongue
ekphrastic drafts on dining linen, ticket stubs.
I become myself a swollen drupe, a robin’s egg,
tea light tableau, four-yard length of rope,
blue stilled silicon, and Siken Crush, slicked
in something colorless and nectar-sweet.
Make me slip between devour dripping
down his iron-painted chin as upon my inner
thigh he works the volta with his mouth.
Elise Thi Tran is a writer, poet, and multimedia artist. Currently an MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, she is the 2022 First Pages Prize winner and a fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Apogee, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Diode, The Kenyon Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.