DC Poets: Jill Kronstadt

He Draws Me as an Old Woman

How quickly I am taken down.

This August morning sags with

flaccid heat. On the bus, two stops past

Madison, he begins to draw. Blocks of sun

skid over vinyl. Rubber meets asphalt like

sweat meets skin. “Quite lovely, actually,”

he says, as if in apology: meantime,

in his sketchbook, he reroutes my face.

Like fate, he can’t make me beautiful

so he makes me old.

Under his starched hands, his nub of

graphite forms rosettes around my cheeks.

What’s in a face? Three stops more, and he’s

speaking of his wife, his art, the usual;

I’ve achieved a battered peace, which sometimes

chafes and bucks at dusk, and sometimes

wakes in summer with sunlight smeared over

its bare arms, and is sometimes the unleashed

Labrador bounding through your yard with

your sandals in its mouth—but which most days

trudges home like a cow with its bell—

“You won’t like it,” he reports, brandishing

his sketchbook. “It’s nothing like you.”

Eighty years old, he explains, I’m slumped in

my seat, blank as cloth, my thoughts full of

the summer day when the clothes I wore to feel pretty

teased an artist into drawing me as someone

already invisible. From the bus I see

years arranged around me, a certain shade of

sky for discontent, and my umbrella on the beach.

The other woman will undress under its shadow.

My stop is next, and he’s still sketching her:

“A minute more,” I tell him.

Jill Kronstadt lives in Washington, DC, where she relocated after sixteen years in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in Tin House Flash Fridays, Moon City Review, The Los Angeles Review, Sou’wester, and others.