Gilded hem throbs pearl and blue, eyes cast

up or down or ahead, blank at first then a tinge 

of a her. My grandma filled a photo album

with images of Virgin Mary over and over: 

cubist, and impressionist, dressed in ambiguously 

Latin American traditional dress, sepia, cooing, 

reading, surrounded by angels, and so on. 

I’m fluent in Mary discourse when I see them 

in museums I mutter the prayer I learned so young: 

I thought all women’s bodies contained fruit. 

Like her, I’m a mother so each painting 

is a mood I knew myself, alternating between despair 

and reverence: Mary exasperated, Mary indifferent 

or in post-nursing bliss or aware of an artist’s eye 

                                 on her as praise 

         Virtuous Mary vessel 

         trope maiden queen 

         subject high bar fleeting

The Marys bear a golden child 

whose eyes stare past her or straight at the painter, 

preternaturally limber and light, maybe haughty. 

The child never registered much for me; 

A baby is all want, especially one

we all share with God, who was always 

a less precise figure. Mary, most body. 

Her gaze is the bramble of ephemerality, 

what is soon her erasure, she holds up 

a baby who will leave her behind until 

she needs him again for similar purpose.

Bio

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years. She is Publisher and Executive Director of Graywolf Press.