"Aphrodite" by Matthew Fertel
Audrey Hall | Sharing a Packet of Sunflower Seeds With You
After Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”
is as much fun as going to St. Louis, Chicago, or Neshkoro
or the witch’s tunnel two miles from our high school, haunted we were told,
but only, we learned, with badly graffitied penises on dank walls,
as much fun as an ice cream-induced stomachache on the banks of the Mississippi,
because in startling a rattlesnake you looked like a sweatered Joan of Arc,
because of my love for you, because of your love for the strange,
because of the art museums and Amish general stores we’ve wandered,
because of the way our eyebrows climb in unison when we listen,
it’s hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything
as uninspired as a wall of spray-painted penises instead of the promised witch,
when years later in the picnic-air of Forest Park we both want to claim Van Gogh:
we both want to exist as tethers without saying so out loud
and I would rather quote Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo to you
than share them with anyone else, which I hope you hear in my delivery,
“I shake your hand firmly,” you say, and I reply, “good handshake.”
is as much fun as going to St. Louis, Chicago, or Neshkoro
or the witch’s tunnel two miles from our high school, haunted we were told,
but only, we learned, with badly graffitied penises on dank walls,
as much fun as an ice cream-induced stomachache on the banks of the Mississippi,
because in startling a rattlesnake you looked like a sweatered Joan of Arc,
because of my love for you, because of your love for the strange,
because of the art museums and Amish general stores we’ve wandered,
because of the way our eyebrows climb in unison when we listen,
it’s hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything
as uninspired as a wall of spray-painted penises instead of the promised witch,
when years later in the picnic-air of Forest Park we both want to claim Van Gogh:
we both want to exist as tethers without saying so out loud
and I would rather quote Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo to you
than share them with anyone else, which I hope you hear in my delivery,
“I shake your hand firmly,” you say, and I reply, “good handshake.”
Audrey Hall is a poet, literature scholar, and marine science enthusiast from Mississippi. Her poems appear in Okay Donkey, Hunger Mountain, Atlanta Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She reads for Black Warrior Review. In 2022, her poetry was nominated for a Best of the Net Award.
Matthew Fertel is a Sacramento-based photographer who has worked in the Photography department at Sierra College since 2004. Before that, he was a fine art auction house catalog photographer in San Francisco for over 10 years.
Matthew's current work focuses on capturing the minutiae he encounters in his daily life. He seeks to expose the hidden beauty in the everyday objects that make up the landscape of our existence. Going to the same locations over days, months and years allows him to capture images under different lighting and weather conditions, and to see objects change over long or short periods of time. There is art hidden everywhere if you learn to see it.
Learn more at his website and on Instagram.
Matthew's current work focuses on capturing the minutiae he encounters in his daily life. He seeks to expose the hidden beauty in the everyday objects that make up the landscape of our existence. Going to the same locations over days, months and years allows him to capture images under different lighting and weather conditions, and to see objects change over long or short periods of time. There is art hidden everywhere if you learn to see it.
Learn more at his website and on Instagram.
