Issue > Poetry
Barbara Siegel Carlson

Barbara Siegel Carlson

Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of poetry collections Once in Every Language (2017) and Fire Road (2013), co-translator of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel (2010), and co-editor of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives (2017). Recent poetry and translations appear in Salamander, Solstice and Poetry Porch. Barbara teaches and tutors in the Boston area.

A Resonant Space

         let's suppose there had to be one who opened her eyes and looked all around
                             and saw who she loved without end. – Dara Wier                      

 

                                     for Gela Pisarova


Her rural scenes in their luminous shades take up every space on her walls. The canvases are made of linen that grew in a field of flax, its warm earthy smell steeped in summer's white nights. The paintings depict women and girls hauling grasses, or washing linen in the lake, or hanging the sheets on a line to dry in the field. Faceless, these brightly dressed figures seem to drift, translucent through the frame. But something hides in them as the memory of light in a dying leaf. Maybe the ghostly city the artist escaped when she went to live with her grandmother during the Siege. Or the peat she dug till her fingers bled as she imagined her parents still alive by the freezing window, every part of her trembling and mute as she waited to hug them again. Something wants to brush us away—or hold us where the flax flowers still rise and breathe on deep moonless nights.

                                                                            

 

 

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