Carl Boon

Ellen Baker With Courbet

In a Montrouge apartment 
south of Paris, Ellen Baker 
paints her toenails blue 
beneath a Gustave Courbet print,   

a nude who straddles a man 
who could be a dog, a fish, 
flesh the earth's turned homely 
and gray. Ellen's breasts   

are nothing like the nude’s, 
which come forth in some wild 
garden near Ornans, 
both alive and dead, 

containers for factories, 
boys on bicycles, the dancers 
Degas gave us. They seem 
to hold everything—even the calls   

of crows at 3 a.m. Ellen's
come to study art, to perfect 
the more inside us. Still, 
she's startled by the nude,   

won't sleep again until 
her breasts are finer, are 
those of the women in Louisville 
who stroll West Main Street   

all August in floral prints. 
Buttering a slice of bread, 
she asks herself what it means 
to make something imperfect. 



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 ­­Carl Boon lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Recent or forthcoming poems appear in Posit, The Tulane Review, Badlands, JuxtaProse, The Blue Bonnet Review, and many other magazines.