Drawing Us Out
By Nicole Burdick
By the time I got to her breasts she was thinking about doughnuts. I was giving value to the underside of her left nipple with light stippling when hunger overtook her, at least that’s what she said during the break, casual in her robe, gobbling the cookies Jen made. Clark crosshatched the same area with soft lead, his point dulling from each mark he left to darken her. Jen transformed the breasts into two rounded squares— very Botero, I thought, but didn’t say. Her jealousy evoked a three-dimensionality that made the tits look like they had a life beyond the chest. I could do this all day, Paul thought to himself as he used his finger to smudge a well just where the breast and rib met. As the model wiped a crumb from her lip, Ivan admitted he’d been on her thighs and a data-mining solution for work, hence the tentative strokes, just before the timer rang. And Karen pitched in about troubles with the feet which most people rarely bother to depict.
Nicole Burdick is a Language Arts educator living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where ants now make their way into her poems more often. Despite the fact that people bless her for doing it, facilitating a thinking-is-fun environment about literature for teenagers is actually a dream job. She also paints abstract stories, collages broken tile, and cooks like she is from everywhere. Her poems can be found in Fence, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere.
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