Paint-by-Number
Jane Zwart

Paint-by-Number

The gerrymandered fawn. The pig carved into blobs and slabs,
truant from a butcher’s guidebook. The flamingo, a coral awning
and titian shadow crushed against its side. I wanted to call it art:
cutting a cornsilk isthmus through ponding syrup, a grizzly’s pelt.

But I knew it was not. It is not that curators embargo the leprous
pegasus and the cobblestone giraffe. It is that beauty is not what
we report to, as recruits to duty; it is that the dab hand told to paint
by a rigid legend—two cornflower, three navy—is not a synesthete.

Jane Zwart

teaches English at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, Rattle, and TriQuarterly, as well as in other journals and magazines.