portrait of a woman

we were too young to be legends but he wanted to leave his mark, so he used my skin as his canvas. i accepted. i bit my lips, plugged my ears, and closed my eyes, emptying my body of all it had to offer so it would be ripe for the harvest, ready to be coated.

his favorite color was violet. he dotted my cheeks with bursts of blue, drizzled some red in the background and let it clot. added ice to counteract the swelling as the black faded to yellow. he framed it so he was superman and i was a soundbite. his fist, my breath, speech balloons. he called it pop art.

when he wanted to keep things simple, he'd smash my teeth into a mosaic, just to kiss each piece and place them in rows and columns, rows and columns, each line etched by god. he collected the colors my gums bled in vials. he called me a stain. he would not work with pigments that had no purpose, he would not rest until my mouth decomposed to silence, until my molars aligned with the nails on the floorboards and all of my matter was squared away in boxes with walls ready to rupture.

eventually he knocked them over like dominoes and swept them to the side. cubism, he said, does not look good on you. he asked me to pose with him and i obliged. i wanted to be good for something. as we undressed, he asked me not to make a scene, told me his art was only a summary but it still had meaning, said if i thought i was more than a crude expression of reality then i was dreaming, called me a stain. he said he wished he had chosen a pigment that he didn't have to strain. he told me to detach my head from my soul and let him in, let him in, let his motifs cull. he drew his brush and began to paint, began to pant, and brushed shapes across my chest with his lips, each circle the size of my breasts, each spiral bigger than the next. he said we were an infinite pattern, an illusion.

when i had nothing left to give, he hung me up at the bar next to a portrait of a woman, bruised like a peach.