James Midgley
Art by Clare Grill
Clare Grill - Phebe, 2020
oil on paper 19" x 15"
Domesticated Interior
The words she’s placing on the kitchen table before him are window-
glass at night, the kind that confuses flying creatures looking for a way
to escape. All words are containers: wet velveteen with a silver latch,
for instance, or a bowl of particularly guilty-looking lemons.
Sometimes, domesticated and furred in reprimands, they emit noises
bespeaking their interiors. Together, the two of them are trying to prise
open a word like “embittered,” but find now it’s been constructed
without a hinge. She tips out a matchbox and lights up. When she cracks
the door to release the smoke, the tail end of a bird’s cry rushes in,
briefly fills the room. If the bird itself had entered, under the glare of
fluorescence, maybe drawn by the bowl of waxy fruit, it would have
become a confused name to itself. Something like “egress” or “halfinch.”
Clare Grill - Priscilla, 2020
oil on paper, 19" x 15"
Jellyfish
Crumpeting idly amid the surf or stranded on the beachfront,
a pained and paining incredulity. These celluloids: our faces
washed, distorted, made a meal of under the sun, fluorescing.
As if each one of them had fallen through a pair of hands
at some crucial moment, left to percolate in silent-movie water.
They roil within themselves within the waves. Why, then, knowing
the danger, knowing the sting, did you reach to touch my cheek?
Clare Grill - Sarah W., 2020
oil on paper, 19" x 15"
Oyster
Unhinged, revealed as not really itself.
It lets out its waters like a speculumed eye.
The question hangs within it
like a moon over the fields of the drowned:
is it dead, yet, and what did it mean really
for it to live? Its tears come
lemon-sour but celebrated, a salt-mass of tinsel.
No thought irritates or gleams. Nothing
sticks, there's nothing it doesn't let go.
Clare Grill - Anne M., 2014
oil on paper, 19" x 15"
Player Piano
No one, as far as I know, is touching the owl
when it comes on in the middle of the day.
The trees spool through it making a jagged noise.
I look from the window as if I had any chance
of glimpsing it and when the music ends
I feel I've tweezered out a stubborn hair.
We aren't one breath, and that isn't my body
or anybody, out there. The owl is opening
its face amid the trees, as if it had a choice,
gets stuck in the machinery, snags in my hearing,
makes a melodious grinding sound. I think of you
again, as if I had any choice, in that paneled
shithole hotel room, your breath an odd-angled
scritching like something trapped in the walls.
Clare Grill - Sarah K., 2013
oil on paper, 19" x 15"
Water / Water
There's a moment, on the phone to you, my silence
and your silence turn away from each other, separate.
I think of reflective water, one face over another,
the surface tension—and imagine an exotic single word
meaning both “leaf soon to fall” and “leaf that has fallen.”
