three micros
by Brendan Todt
i
after The Madonna of the Long Neck
Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola
(Also called Parmigianino, after Parma, the city of his birth.)
The Uffizi
Sarah was not named after where she came from. But she has been known for what she is or has or lacks. Sarah the poet. Sarah of the long, nearly boneless fingers, of the nearly heartless breast, of the nearly breastless chest. Sarah of the childless hips and lap. Sarah the motherless, the botherless. Sarah of the third floor. Of the odd word. Of the Old World.
The mannerists rejected their Renaissance fathers’ desires for naturalism and reality. Sarah, who was told as a child she could do or be anything, rejected the naturalism of a world in which words mean things. This doesn’t make any sense, said her mother at the first poems. This doesn’t seem like me, said the mother when Sarah showed her the first poems about her.
Though they often fought, Sarah maintained the manners she’d learned from her mother as a child. Perhaps anything really was possible and she could do or be anything. But Sarah also enjoyed a world in which the fork went here and the water glass went there and the napkin sat in your lap like a beautifully white but dying child.
Though they didn’t speak, they ate together at the restaurant on the Rue—Sarah with her series of forks and her mother with her one big spoon. In the water glass, dripping and sad, Sarah saw the reflection of her right hand eating and the distorted shape of her mother touching up her nose.
They never made it to the Uffizi, but Sarah showed her mother the painting in a book. It pained her. No child is that size, said her mother. No woman has a neck or fingers or torso or legs or feet so long. And, though I loved you, she admitted, I never once looked at you like that.
ii
The student showed Sarah the video she had taken of Sarah crossing the street near campus, from the pharmacy toward the library, how the car in the distance got closer—but slowly—and how Sarah, apparently scared, brisked in her little black shoes across the pavement, often looking back at the vehicle, at one point dropping something indistinguishable in the video, and leaving it there, arriving at the other side with a relieved hop over the curb, and continuing on undisturbed, more steady and with longer strides, toward the library book drop. And then the video stopped.
Why on earth did you record that, asked Sarah, who realized suddenly where her lip balm had gone. The student shrugged and explained that she thought a fight between the drivers of two cars stopped at the light might have been about to break out, and there Sarah was in the background, and the student, for whatever reason, found it weird—she kept using the word weird—to see Sarah out in the wild—she kept using the word wild—though in fact Sarah was only a couple hundred yards off campus and every single business visible in the background offered students generous university discounts.
Sarah asked the student to play and then replay the video, and they watched it together, and when a few students gathering for the upcoming class saw them and asked what they were doing, they joined in, too, and soon Sarah had to ask if the video reminded anyone else of the Patterson-Gimlin film, to which the students had to say no, until Sarah explained that the Patterson-Gimlin film was the famous grainy footage of the so-called Bigfoot, at which point several of the students said yes, clarifying—or trying to—that the video and the angle reminded them of the footage, not Sarah herself, or her awkward gait, or her primitive animalism, or her discomfited look back, as though someone or something had been watching, as though she had finally been discovered.
iii
Sarah still writes poems on the Sabbath, but she does not allow herself to write poems about snow, autumn, hair, poems, tulips, leaves, city pools, private pools, freshly dug graves, or giraffes (don’t ask). She cannot not write about her mother—she tried that—but she can prohibit herself from using the word mother. This includes variations and phrases, such as motherly, motherless, mother fucker, Mother Goose, mom, mommy, mum, and more. Earth (on the Sabbath) must indicate the planet—one of the nine (nay eight)—and not the thing spaded or shoveled or built upon or lamented. (And definitely not Mother Earth.) Father may be used at will; she still misses him so much but so rarely gets to say so. Farther, on any day, must appropriately reference literal and not figurative distance. Sabbath poems may address paintings, certainly, but only the abstract or non-representational varieties. No poem, ever, should attempt to point out the irony that non-literal language is called figurative but figurative painting addresses a literal, concrete subject. Barnett Newman is welcome any day in any poem, on any planet, in any plane. Sabbath etymologies must be invented, not real; folk, not formal: Widow emerges out of the late Norman, early Frisian-Saxon window, suggesting that the death of the partner allows the survivor to better see the potential of their own horizons. Parent (Anglo-French, derived from the Latin paranoia) may only refer to a digital folder, not one of the two (nay one, nay none) generational human forebears. Orphan must reference the ancient art of typesetting and the lone lines of text nearly crushed under the weight of the rest.
Photo of Brendan Todt (credit: Mile 90 Photography)
BIO: Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. He has been working on a series of short fiction that follows a character named Sarah. “Sarah draws little moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash fiction. Other Sarah stories have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Moon City Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. In addition to teaching and writing, Brendan runs ultras and coaches youth soccer.