Drip Study
After Jackson Pollock
I tried to make something clean once.
It didn’t survive my hands.
The body always tells the truth first—
a tremor in the wrist,
the way anger prefers motion
to confession.
Paint flung itself where it wanted.
Gravity had opinions.
So did my pulse.
This wasn’t chaos.
It was accumulation.
Years of swallowed sentences
learning velocity.
Every line a refusal to stand still.
Every splatter a record
of where I couldn’t stop myself.
They call it violent.
They call it accident.
But nothing lands like this
without intention somewhere upstream.
I moved around the canvas
the way you circle a wound—
careful not to touch it,
desperate to see where it ends.
Color collided.
Layer over layer.
Proof that restraint is a luxury
of people who were never on fire.
There’s no center here.
No horizon.
Just the evidence
of staying alive long enough
to empty yourself
without asking permission.
If you stand close,
you can smell the sweat in it—
metallic, human, unfinished.
This is what it looks like
when control finally admits defeat
and something more honest
takes over.
*
Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been writing since she was seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, traces a young woman’s growth and healing through unsent letters.
Her first poetry collection, Myths in the Feed, sold out six times in three months, and she is Crying Heart Press’s best-selling author. She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 2025.
She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.
Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
