Katrina Smolinsky

Maybe I Am Just Writing a Poem About Beauty-- 

By peering through a telescope with the dust cap still screwed on.
But instead of a blank void, there is a tiny Botticelli
sketched against the dark, iridescent as a clamshell in seaspray,
as a dewdrop on a petal on a wet, black oil slick.
The ocean churns like a stomach sour with desire. A butterfly ache.
A swallowtail, a skipper, a hairstreak, a glasswing
beating ceaselessly against the riptide current and the western wind.
Because maybe beauty is terror, an infinite-eyed,
four-mawed angel who demands total surrender to an unknowable,
unmappable constellation, who commands, LOOK,
and points a finger heavenward to the still blinking dead stars.

--
Katrina Smolinsky is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. She is an MFA candidate at the College of Charleston, and a graduate of the Evergreen State College. In collaboration with the Gibbes Museum of Art, she works as a poetry instructor at St. John’s High School.