2009
Lauren drew egg shaped bodies
One thin border separated the spheres
from white, unpopulated backgrounds.
With the painstaking exactitude
of a three-year-old who has not learned
to use a straight edge
Lauren drew lines—hair, perhaps pins,
arrows radiating out from the boundaries.
I scoured for form and function—realism,
and could never grasp that her art,
sprung from the body-heart,
a primal architecture
not from head.
Lauren said, “This is you”
handing Warren an egg.
It was easy to assume
the lines were a study of his beard.
We joked about this egg—at least—
not being bald.
For weeks Lauren drew radiating eggs,
strewing sheets throughout our apartment
common as the repeating patterns of ferns.
I imagined each was another
portrait of Warren,
that her wariness of his company
was appreciation
until the evening she blurted
she didn’t want him visiting
whenever daddy was away.
Lauren upturned her bowl of salad
over his head and giggled.
Warren’s head at last
was mimicry, not model,
and her reaching out
was in a language even I understood.
