Portrait of a Woman Artist

We were outcasts living in America’s raised fist.

The cancer crouched in his lungs, waiting
for the surgeon’s scalpel.

My love dying upstairs as the tide spat bricks.

King was already dead. Kennedy next.

I made the headstone myself, bludgeoned the alabaster.
It consoled me with its weight.

When I took up with black musicians,
someone left a dead chicken on the porch.

I didn’t care if I had enemies.

I taught myself to paint with the blunt edge
of a stick, ploughed into ice-thick water
to watch a cormorant dry his wings.

Friend, I tell you, I did not end.
I paddled harder then.

In memory of Pat de Groot

MELISSA TUCKEY is a poet and literary activist. She has a background in environmental activism and is a co-founder of Split This Rock, a national organization dedicated to “calling poets to the center of public life.” Tuckey is author of Tenuous Chapel, a book of poems selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press First Book Prize (2013) and editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press 2018). Her honors include a fellowship at Black Earth Institute, a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and writing awards from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, and teaches community-based creative writing workshops in Ithaca, New York.