At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses

I say
I love the way—
You grab my wrist:

Don’t put it into
words, don’t get it
twisted,

It just needs to exist.

So here I am, unmoored at the
museum,
Squinting at shapes arising in my vision
Like clifftops in the mist,
My eyes unlensed, imbibing the horizons
Of oddly-lighted rooms.
Of wire looms festooned with metal scraps,
Of dangled circuits lapsing into lassos,
Of crosshatched gray and black,
Of persons in long jackets
who murmur words like “angular” at the Picassos,

Trying to stop my words
From tangling round the things before I see them—
Their imprecision, their syllabic gallop,
The sleaze of them, like greasy bacon wrapped around a scallop,
Negating what they promise to enhance
With appetizer’s, advertiser’s, ease:
The cunning of them, running interference
Between the naked eye and the appearance,
Subtracting the refraction of a glance.

*

A. A. Gunther is a legal writer living in Long Island, New York. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from the Harvard University Extension School, and her short story “Baby Teeth” appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of Dappled Things. No art museum will be the same to her until her sister comes back from Germany.