In Your Interior Wilderness, after Fritz Ascher’s Female Nude (poem)

Congratulations to Miguel Coronado, first place winner of the NYU Creative Writing Program’s 2019 Gallery Prize competition, and honorable mentions Lily Dolin and Joey Solomon, all students in NYU’s Creative Writing Program. The Prizes were awarded for the best poem by an NYU undergraduate in response to the exhibition Fritz Ascher: Expressionist, which was on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, from January 6 to April 9, 2019. Contest judge was Geoffrey Nutter, Clinical Professor of Creative Writing, NYU.

Fritz Ascher, Female Nude, 1916. White gouache over graphite, watercolor, and black ink on paper. 17 3/8 x 12 1/4 in. Private collection. Photo: Malcolm Varon. © Bianca Stock

In Your Interior Wilderness
 …………after Fritz Ascher’s Female Nude

Birds will build their nests with reams
of stolen hair and bits of blue sky in your
dancing shadow. Wind will move your leaves.
It hurts most when you are on the verge
of becoming.
……………………Rabbits will dig down into the earth.
Foxes will hunt the breeze instead, as it moves you,
soothes through you, loosens your mind like a snake’s
long backbone, or a tree bent in the sun, or a door
in a cathedral. In Matisse’s head, a dancer makes
joy out of air—
……………………the song never ends. Salmon will shake
and shimmer their way upstream, up muscle and dream
their way through your body. Something takes roost,
doesn’t stop taking; you stand spring-touched, beaming
light like a foreshadowing of wings, or a new book.
In Degas’s head,
………………………a dancer is a body of hard work.
It will never stop. You are beginning to blossom
peaches—again—how many years has it been?
Spring wriggles like a worm, sprouts innocent from
its mother’s dirt-bosom, you grow full of teeming
even if most of it
……………………….is that familiar anxious feeling.
In Ascher’s head, a dancer’s limbs twist happily,
painfully, and the interior is teased out, lovingly,
cautiously, like a wild animal you are irrationally
afraid of staying still. You are always trying to be
more than yourself:
…………………………….I am always trying to be
someone else, like you, dancing in the blue swing
of night, you and my petals graying, peeling away,
my peach seeds swelling, soft with fuzzy longing,
in my head I am dancing, in my head I am far away.

Written by Miguel Coronado, student in Creative Writing, NYU