This piece was written August 21st, 2026. It will be taken down in the future and moved into a future archive.
The Heart
Random-Page-Flip-and-Point 'Found' Poetry Piece with the aid of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
They are fracturing now, the skies painted in my grandmother's home. Someone forgot to seal in the paint.
I wasn't there when she cashed in a favor with her church's artist. But she told me that he was eager for the assignment. It must've been interesting, to be given the prompt of replicating the sky while shielded from it.
I imagine his neck hurting as he paints the pale oranges caressing the edges in vignette. I imagine the room feeling brighter and brighter with every layer he puts down. Maybe he his breathing thins, a can of paint popped open beside him, and it feels as though he would fall for minutes and minutes if he stumbled off his ladder. Maybe he creates shifts in time as he flattens out the blue, deepening it with reds and bringing it back with yellows. Maybe he feels a breeze as he sweeps a hard-bristled brush against the drywall. I wonder if he wants to paint in more, and if he pitches ideas to my grandmother.
Maybe the skes would have looked more alive with the underbellies of birds tucked into the clouds. Perhaps it'd have been better if he'd added warmer glows to the white and yellow outlines cupping around ceiling fans. Maybe he shouldn't have made so many suns that needed those warmer glows. Maybe if he had felt the comfortable heat of an August day on his forehead as he worked, he would have captured a sky that didn't hang awry when my grandmother turned on a table lamp to read. For rooms so lucky to be so wide and so tall, the fragments of sky made them look so small. I wonder if he felt as large in those rooms as I do, and if he felt as anxious as when I look up.