Ekphrastic Feature

Week Four

This Place

by Leigh Merrill

Blank Pink Mall

by Terese Svoboda

The color of pretty, the color
of the sink just before the rinse
            is finished: dilute blood.

Cheap, you say, but there it is,
            Rorschach's wall +
corner = home, a pink petticoat,

ripped, with a safety pin
pinned to skin. It's your work
            to assert the walls inside

            aren't black and my glasses
colored wrong. Seep love into it,
praise the blood pumping

the heart plump until the siphon
            slips and all rushes,
with eagerness, out.

            Pink-haired, pink-hairy
would disappear into the door:
                        it's not a color,

it's a code, a number on the paint can
            before Hopper emptied
the premises, his wife left inside,

bruised and weeping. Still he thinks:
            more flat light. The feminine
like this isn't washed clean

or even pink-washed, the girl's left
holding the dripping cord:
a mall-birthed girl.

            You thought male?
The marquees all virgin-power,
the kind that don't talk.