The Quarantine Review Holiday Issue – December 28, 2021
So happy to have my poem, “Six A.M.,” published in The Quarantine Review, alongside my painting, “Winter City.”
Painting Angels, part 3
The first angel was an accident. In my darkest time, the angels that followed were like the work I’d done years before, of demons and almost-humans that reflected my life and observations and what came to me in the night.
Then it came time to put the darkness away. I began to paint angels that would keep watch over us. Now I believe in Happy. I think that if you believe, you can find it.
Painting Angels, part 2
When I was still in the dark place, I wrote a poem,
only feathers string me up across the sky, one nudge or wrinkle and I fall, crash through violet dusk and skyscrapers, this wingless, landlocked, flattened creature of despair
that described the fragile threads/feathers that kept me from falling through the sky. I drew a version of the poem, and what appeared shortly after on my canvas was an angel that hovered above the city, pulled upward by her wings. People saw in her what they needed to: a guardian angel, an angel of hope or an angel of sorrow. That painting is Angel Over the City.
The painting appears on the cover of Brandon Pitt’s powerful book of poetry, Tender in the Age of Fury. For more about Brandon Pitts, visit http://www.brandonpitts.com/
Painting Angels
The first angel was an accident. Or I could say it just arrived. I was in a dark place, and all I could do was turn to art. I had always put my life on paper, pulling the terrible out of me so I could breathe. I began a painting, Fallen 1, from one of my drawings of broken people/creatures and put mountains in the background. When people came by, they saw an angel: the unfinished mountains in the background had become wings that sprung from the its back.
I began to adapt the concept of the fallen angel in other paintings; the angel had been removed from heaven, but perhaps in my version, returning was a possibility.
Painting My Mother
I drew my mother for the first time when I was in art school, and didn’t draw her again until she had her first, then second stroke, and became like a child to me. Nothing prepares you.
When my mother passed, I was lost. I did not know how to survive but I started to paint, madly, and write, always. I pulled the despair out of me and onto paper.
I painted my pain, then angels, and then my mother began to nudge me, telling me it was time to paint her. I looked for her in the wedding photos that were taken when she was just nineteen. I found her in the hours, days and weeks that I spent looking into her face, her eyes.
Beloved mother, you never leave my side. Your beautiful, gnarled, arthritic feet rest in my lap, and I am home. You lie in the shadows of me, keeping me from harm.
Photo of my mother, Zalakha, with my daughter, Natasha, in the summer of 2010, before the first stroke.
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