Casualties

Eminent Domain

One painter claims her art eats her but fame called her out when she removed Emmett Till from his grave, his scars remade, his coffin open season for her palette.

She draws from news I remember framed by headlines before found art when abstraction made a kind of sense in oily drips and color splats. Rothko’s reds, two-tone blacks his own property.

I wrestle with the two, a lunch of me in Aleppo, where I ate fool among donkeys, cows, dead lambs. I could tell you of a boy I knew there, but how can I make him mine, own his bullet wounds, his parents’ pain?