After To the Convalescing Woman, by Erich Heckel (Germany) 1912-1913

I.
A year ago, I sat up in bed and took ninety minutes to decide how I was going to lift myself out of bed. Bending my steroid-swollen legs made me wince with pain. The carpet flooded with bits of skin that wanted to escape my disease. A year ago in bed, in the hours I couldn’t sleep, I flipped through books about the Dutch masters, the collections at The Hermitage and the Louvre, surveys of American and British art. I wanted to envelop myself in color and shapes and the pure mastery of artists.

II.
The potted plant in the corner of the dining room reminded me that once I, too, could stand erect without the help of some device. That I could blossom in front of the windows. Writing in response to art keeps my petals open to the light even when all I see is darkness.

III.
I surround my house with sunflowers without awareness. Silk sunflowers in a Rosenthal vase. A Van Gogh print on the powder room wall so when I inject myself several times a day with short-acting insulin or blood thinners, I can see beauty. More vases of silk sunflowers on the dining room table and in my bedroom. I have never been a fan of the sun, but sunflowers greet me with strength and resilience. They turn toward me when others, rooted in ignorance, turn away.

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Barbara Krasner (she/her) is a New Jersey-based poet of ten collections, including Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Memory Collector (Kelsay Books, 2027). She has been leaning into writing in response to art as a way to grapple with the confluence of several chronic conditions.

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