Lake Eerie laps at my palms as I gather
sea glass in my pockets. Driftwood lain
in the sand. Only the flattest stones will skip
and we scavenge them for each other.

Four skips I can make across the lake.
Four rounds of sea glass I’ll bring home
and place on my windowsill. Our bodies
suck in the purpling sky, run from the tide

flooding over our boots. I have tried
to be good. Pour the wine, wash the sand
from my calves. Were you loved, when
you shattered your bottle into the water?
Pasta for dinner. Soft, soft glass.

Published November 10, 2024

Katey Funderburgh is a queer poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry candidate at George Mason University. Katey serves as the co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writers Project, and as a Poetry Alive! fellow. Her poems appears in Blood Pudding and Black Glass Pages, among others. When Katey isn't writing, you can find her laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle. Or find her on Twitter @coloradoKatey.

William Baziotes began his career at a glass company in Reading, Pennsylvania, then moved to New York in 1933 to study at the National Academy of Design. He was fascinated by classical art, literature, and nature and often visited the old-master paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as the fossil and ethnographic collections at the Museum of Natural History. He struggled to develop a style of painting until he saw an exhibition of Picasso’s work in 1939. He later recalled that he looked at Picasso until “I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breath. Finally . . . I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject . . . Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it---a feverishness of death and beauty” (Interview with Gordon Onslow-Ford, 1975, quoted in William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1978). Baziotes believed that the artist’s spirit was far more important than his subject matter and allowed the image to “reveal itself” on the canvas as he painted.