“What It Takes, What It Gives” by Cheryl Pappas

“What It Takes, What It Gives” by Cheryl Pappas is a prose poem, an ekphrasis, and a eulogy. Impressions of life; remainders of death. The bold hues and shapes taken from Lee Krasner’s 1971 Palingenesis are reawakened in words: a passing of souls from paint to page.  —Court Harler

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After Lee Krasner, Palingenesis

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My soul is a splendid, manufactured thing,

creaking cranes and wrecking balls—

the noise keeps me up at night.

Hard edges smoothed with berry cream, mixed with hard-earned blood. Generations get rebirthed when bodies from my past crush into molten ash.

I can smell the talcum powder from here.

Multitudinous shapes linger on my tongue (how insensate I am depends wholly on pressing tasks at hand): black patent leather shoes, jackets used for blankets during the war, a hypodermic needle, a vinyl record, a candle.

Holiness is a crowd of color, clanking in greens and pitched pinks, barely contained, but held. I spin out new levels like fans twirling fast back into the bowels of earth.

I am my brother

I am my father

I am my mother

They are dead.

I am food

Let it begin.

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CHERYL PAPPAS is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). Her work has appeared in swamp pink, Fractured Lit, Wigleaf, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow.

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Featured image by Michael Hamments, courtesy of Unsplash.