after Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née Thérèse Feuillant, Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1866

Before fabric can come out as gown
it must greet the killing room. Insects
ground to powder like licorice root,
bone-sore hands displacing gentle earth
for a thimble’s worth of clay. O,
how a beet will bloody everything
it touches, taking careful note of the men
in the root cellar. Even the word oxide
feels violent, a bit like a knife’s edge, provoking
and eager-like, which is why the softening of red
can seem so profound: this dress, with rivulets of ruffles
clutching tight to the hem like a child.
There are several degrees of separation between me
and this garment and yet I still feel corset-choked,
ribs forming fists as a means to grasp something
that isn’t quite so breathy. Here is the pink
of my brainstuff. Here it is again
trying to make sense of the godlike values
pulled from the painter’s pallet.
And to resurrect so dutifully this dear matron
near death with boredom, river-wrapped
in window light and this rose-prim dressing gown.
Like her, I too have stood patient and still, have held
my breath long enough to know when air
yearns to leave. But this leaving I’ve learned
is also a color, a shade found only
in the brief moment when an eye is forced to blink,
when a portrait turns its gaze just slightly,
tinted with the tired look of longing.





Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the chapbook Poems to Stage Dive to (Stanchion Books, 2026) and full-length collection Every Living Day (Thirty West, 2023). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work can be found in The Offing, The Harvard Advocate, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

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