Skyler Lovelace
3 Poems

 

Avatar

I made her and clothed her and sent out into a Second Life.
I helped her interact with a parade of masked fools.
Finally, bored, I showed her how to build a shed by someone else’s river
And posed her comfortably in a corner.

I don’t remember her name
Or even the password to the site.
I wonder sometimes how she is.  Has anyone found her?
I hope they’re being kind.

 

In My Basement Studio

Some Objects of this work have a special meaning such as keys and buttons.  Keys signify a tool of access.  Cherry believes we are all trying to access something, whether it’s material or spiritual.  Buttons denote fasteners and our need to hold things together.
–Curator’s note on assemblages by Schroeder Cherry

I have three shoeboxes of steel binder clips, all sizes,
So determined to hold things together, no matter how much it pinches.
And four rubber mallets, because I keep losing them, and buying another
Before I find the last one.  So many things need pounding.

Five cans of spray starch, although I never iron.
Two shelves of frames for art I haven’t made yet.
A small disco ball over the toilet
Because at my age, that passes for dancing.

My high school classmate Steve collected coins.
He died while jogging, age sixty, and his family cleared his house
Of jars and jars of commemorative state quarters.
Was he holding the country together?

Every afternoon the light slants across my drafting table
And a cricket or two leaps lazily, crazily across the tiles.
Every morning I find empty shells of crickets
Their lives scattered during the dark night.

 

The Year I got Glasses

When I couldn’t read the numbers on the psalms board at church,
They realized my eyes were wonky.
My new glasses were cat-eyed-shaped with sparkly corner rhinestones.

And that’s when I found out Pastor Smith wasn’t surrounded
By an aura of light when he warned us not to dance, because
He’d rather his girl walked through the pearly gates like a Jersey cow
Instead of twisting gracefully down into the fires of hell.

He was just an old, short man, leaning in the dais
With the reading lamp shining onto his warty face.
And I was ten, and the president got shot last year,
But now the Beatles arrived in America and
Every girl in my class wore white go-go boots.

We went to school dressed to dance.
Everyone could see that, and my new glasses
Showed me more every day.

 

 

Skyler Lovelace is a Wichita artist who works in both pixels and paint. She’s professor of Digital Media at a local community college and owns Pixel Time, a digital arts business.