Granell
Among the saturated colors of surrealist bricolage
the small hoop hanging from your left ear
and crisp lines of your visage
play upon marigold and sangria undulations of brushstrokes.
We make blind sketches of each other’s faces:
smooth flesh
deconstructed
into hasty
fragments
the bijou curve of my nose
the dimpled borders of your lips:
the same forms we trace softly
with fingers that peel lips
away
from teeth
between ballet pink linens.
Among warm sheets
our faces are close enough
to render the eyes
a lens
at a low f-stop
— but even now,
a meter of echoey floors,
cold draft
between us
I still see you
up close
ojos profundos
hoyuelos
nariciña
I brush your lips with my eyelashes,
scanning their contours,
concretizing them
like ink on paper,
But your skin is not opaque canvas
and your mouth is not terracotta paint.
and your earring is three-dimensional,
not rendered in gold leaf.
My arm draped over your moving chest,
I feel your body give and take,
press my lips into your neck
as if to prove to you
that I breathe too
Sabrina Boutselis graduated with an intermedia concentration in Literature, incorporating Cinema Studies and Art History into her major, and a minor in Hispanic Studies. Sabrina worked at the Writing Center and the Wellin. She now lives in Madrid and is pursuing a MA in Contemporary Art History & Visual Culture at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía. For her master’s thesis, she is exploring Spanish and American colonial influence on the Philippines and in context of her own biracial identity, incorporating diaspora studies and postcolonial perspectives. The product will be a video piece that merges personal ethnography and artistic investigation of these topics. She is soon beginning an internship in Education at the Reina Sofía.
Poetry board, Fall 2018 to Spring 2019