mckenzington

I note in the distance the creaky door of the ramshackle house crammed between chipped paint edges. A widow with a painter’s smock stands in the frame. Fraying corners and technicolour oranges patterned on her gravel dusted sandals, summer sun seeping into veins filling a cavity once forgotten and leaving behind a spillage of freckles. The smattering of dried paint bits on the wooden paintbrush is vaguely aquamarine – listless and tender, a colour come undone. Inside she is vermilion like the fire that licked Joan’s feet or the colour of her beating heart under cropped hair and men’s clothes as she led the French to sunrise. Purple pansies plucked carelessly from the garden nestle in her hair, they are in dire need of watering but horticultural trivialities never were a passion of hers. Scraping and painting over, again and again, emptying and filling falling and catching she makes the process vivid. The summer sun stretches out, not scorching but