By William Doreski

You’re curating late Picasso
at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Because the paintings masticate
their subjects to pulpy shards
you’ve inspired yourself to replace
your teeth with plastic, ceramic,
or possibly stainless steel.

The show opens with slop and slur
of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Thick
and arrogant with power, donors
pose for Globe photographers
while the aesthetes like me wring
our hands and hang out as far
from the bar as possible. You stride

among the elite like police
on the beat. They haven’t heard
your plan to replace your smile
with the most frightening dentures
you can find. But you believe
in art, not nature, and art speaks
the language of money, the one
global tongue. The thick people
crowd the bar, guzzling drinks
too volatile for people like me
to handle without fracturing
along predictable fault lines.
They all sport custom dental work
in the Carpenter Gothic style.

You want them to vomit dollars
right there on the marble tile.
underwriting future exhibits
Your hairdo bobs on the swells
as you cross the room to shake
my hand and hope I’ve enjoyed
the liquor and snacks. Your smile

even with your familiar old teeth,
is a death trap. Once you shark yourself
with artificial choppers you’ll ingest,
by default, everything around you,
learning from Picasso how
to render any subject foolish
for the sake of a higher cause.

By Thomas Zimmerman

Tonight the gallery will open wide
as dreaming’s yawning maw, the famished mind
alight with torches, dogs asleep beside
the fire — the wrench, the ledger left behind.
Kandinskys, Rauschenbergs, and Blakes appear.
Picassos, Klees, and Leonardos glow.
The dark of Caravaggios, the fear
and awe of Turners swirl with Dürers, grow
immense with Goyas, Michelangelos.
Cezannes and Rembrandts, Jackson Pollocks flare
with inner energies. The bold Mirós,
Rossettis, and Van Goghs imbue the air
with god-light. Dreamers wake, reborn to dawn,
to potencies, to robins on the lawn.

By Valentina Cano

You are a gap in my room,
a missing tooth my roving tongue of a mind
keeps returning to.
You are a voice missing from the house,
the quieted flutter of your presence
a flat-line through these rooms.
You are missing.
From me.

By Alannah Taylor

The child looks up at the clouds and sees old men, horses, a fish eating spaghetti loops
She feels like the clock face is stern and commanding when it reads 9:30 a.m. on a morning when she is late for school
Her mother has smiley knees
Brisk keys
The lightbulbs are sleepy when you first turn them on
The flower grows quickly in attempt to impress her
Trucks on the road are easily made impatient: always grunting at each other
But at night, in the dark, she feels scared, thinks she is lonely.
The gambler imagines patterns in randomness
Sees faces on everything
Thinks his computer breaks just to spite him for leaving tea rings on the desk
Sees his dead son in strawberries
Posts on dating sites “lonely 42-year-old.”
This old woman attends séances, speaks with spirits, reads messages in palms
Sleeps like an empty husk, grappling for an anchor.
This man talks to his gnomes
Bids the queen on his stamps a safe journey
Makes secret, unspoken deals with the numbers on the bus arrival board in the cold
Blames his pen for bad writing
Tries to seduce the Sun out of hiding on bank holidays
Sits crying in his bedroom on Christmas Day.
This boy with his lucky conker, his time honoured companion
Is scared to go to the bathroom unaccompanied.
Her with the pigtails
Playing with puppets
Scolding her shoelaces and feeling comforted by the moon
Saying goodbye to seashells and thank you to her football boots
Getting anxious at playtime.

Seeking out for other minds
Constantly projecting a mind where
A mind is not,
Feeling ourselves alone,
In spite of what we may conjure,
Spurning our imaginings.

By Eliza Callard

My days of being an Olympic swimmer

(which never began) are over. My body
is 40 and tired and I never competed

even in high school, yet I had, until now,
imagined that door open. The two

little girls giggling furiously while they leap-
frog over one another to play a complex

four-hand piano number — I will never be
one of them. It’s true I play the piano, but

never like that. I could practice these skills,
you say. What about the camera strapped

to the eagle’s back showing the flight we
can never have? Silent, smooth, feathered.

I only fly when I sleep.