portraits of home

Kate Wexell, United States

[Banks of the Oise at Auvers, oil painting on canvas, 1863, Daubigny]

i’m trying to find home in the laced maple trees, leeches and lilypads

rocking back and forth in grandma’s river. clammy. mosquitos

thick like grandpa’s irish whiskey and blackberry stains. finding

meaning in solitary reverence, wondering why the tree trunk

stands alone in the buoyant plains. lipizzaners go unnoticed.

[Landscape, oil on panel, 1842, Rousseau]

everything intoxicating is lonely. empty and heaven-ordained.

crespuclar pillars constructing a pantheon of portraits.

cathedrals of stone and grass. horseshoe lakes in the

meditation of the unknown.

i can’t see the truth in a state of routine.

[Loch Lomond, oil on canvas, Doré]

the celtic dreamed of prisoners taking the low road. my

strawberry inheritance has no homeland.

souls flutter in ships and chickenpox.

we speak broken gaelic and no language at all.

deafened by ellis island and protestant chatter.

spikes are drawn through highland knees until they’re f

orgotten beside one set of keys.

[Puppet, wooden sculpture, 1960s, unidentified Bamana artist]

red blood lands are stained with wars and horsemen.

i find my soulmate in the hare-sniffing ground and

hoofprints of wild mustangs. tiny. innocent.

wholly selfish creatures. never understanding the outside.

unattainable children riding on chalky ponies.

love and sunlight pounding through bashful sunflowers; laughing;

dancing on horseback.

[Red Evening Sky, oil on canvas, 1915, Nolde]

the only homes i’ve been certain of are my synesthetic sunsets.

grappling the broken porch swing. i can dangle my legs until i

reach the sun. hues from flame in milkweed and wild onion.

salmon and carnation affixed above clover. the nights laying under

white-hot paint speckles

bring me to the final question.

[Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, oil on canvas, 1812, Martin]

the universe is crumbled and distorted; stretched thin by the gas-guzzling

breeze and ochre reefs. jigsaw compasses point everywhere and i

keep searching. hop in the car with commandments holding me back.

let’s drive until my playlist runs out. sleep on caving hoods with

mozart’s operas airing out open windows.

we’re all dust and stars again.

i live between three homes i can never inhabit.

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when you wish you could live in a leonid afremov painting

Kate Wexell, United States

my first home smells of vanilla and expectations.

of opportunity and fortune-tellers predicting

i will leave but always belong here. it’s like mismatched

socks and dresses that are too snug; boring like beige paint.

it tastes of weed and watchdogs, honey and salt, and

week-old gas station donuts in the cabinet next to organic bagels.

i can never live up to the ex-slumdog ethics and i’m

not an escape artist with a piercing whistle.

my second home was built with the bricks of scandinavia.

of knowing i come from somewhere and nothing and the

smell of cinnamon rolls and sunsets. it is the place where I'm

given a key that goes to a house nowhere that’s shrouded in nameless

purple wildflowers.

i share the same straw hair, indigo eyes, and scarlet blood as the

town but have no face. i don’t belong.

the land slowly exterminates me like it did my mother through weed-blown

summers and thirty below winters that make cars

stop in the middle of the road.

i share my home’s tongue, its fragrance of dandelions, and

the taste of lemonade. but it is solitude for

wandering thoughts of being unwanted.

my third home is hidden somewhere in orange cafes,

emerald flickering ballroom floors, pina coladas, and

bluejay wings, bathed in the aroma of mountain lakes and

sun-glazed trails. my third home is invisible. it is unmade.

it is the sun when chains are broken and i can

migrate in the light like a derelict moth.

and i’m forever dancing on postcards: formless, shapeless,

an urn at birth that has dissolved into clay and one day

returns to the earth.

Kate Wexell, 18, is an environmental journalism student at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her writing has been published in numerous anthologies, and she was recognized in the Penguin Random House Creative Writing Awards. She has an upcoming poetry chapbook being published by Juven Press.