Yellow Soap Signature
Alison Eastley

He’d gestulate so wildly he’d polychrome anyone
nearby but later say it was an attempt to paint infinity
instead of walls, to somehow discover the signature
of the woman he loved instead of aimless and uncertain
death Akhmatova described as “chalking doors with
crosses and calling the ravens” but Vincent van Gogh
expressed difficulties when he said the yellow-soap
part isn’t yellow-soapy enough and tenderness isn’t
tender enough. Maybe he was referring to the woman
who modeled “Sorrow” when she wasn’t bowing her
head doing blow jobs instead of blowing bubbles
in the bathwater of poverty predicting suicide dissolves
even the palest lemon at the bottom of the sea.