"Forced Fruit" by Heidi Seaborn

Forced Fruit
~ a zuihitsu after Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

The new state laws ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most women even know they are pregnant. Sometimes what we don’t know can hurt us. The fix is in.

Fixed into someone’s version of a still life. Gaze at the fruit at Les Demoiselles’ feet—grapes and a sweet peach. Perhaps 17 on the sugar scale.

At 17, we are fizzy, furred——. God we are glorious, the temperature purring as we pose our geometric equation of breasts and thighs on beach towels. Tanned bodies queueing in the loo, fixing hair, unaware the line of our mouths will be painted shut.

Picasso claimed for me, there are only two kinds of women, goddesses, and doormats. I imagine his boots, muddied with marl, the limestone so productive for the vines.

Because it failed to rain this summer, the wine harvest promises to be especially good. Even as I write this, the crush of grapes is taking place. Fruit at its most potent, plump state, reduced, casked and left to ferment.

In the renovated MOMA in New York, room after room of Picassos. We are masked, his women and me. Our eyes sutured into the past. I have the habit of looking over my shoulder for the future.

I was not yet 17 when Roe v. Wade became law. Had just begun to find the contours
of my body. A body already lost to rape.

The laws make no exception for rape or incest. When he was sixty-one, Picasso declared women are machines for suffering to Françoise Gilot, his twenty-one-year-old mistress.

The women’s suffrage movement had won the right to vote when Gilot was just
an infant. A baby water-colored by her mother, an artist, hoping to hold still a life
that she knew would escape the frame.

Last week, I took a photo of dahlias from my garden in a French milk pitcher, the bowl of fruit in my kitchen, the cutting board with a sliced peach. How a peach softens under the knife. I posted it on Instagram with the caption, Still Life at the End of Summer.

heidi seaborn

Heidi Seaborn is author of Marilyn: Essays & Poems, [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks. Recent work is in Blackbird, Beloit, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, diode, Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, Penn Review, Radar, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from NYU.  heidiseabornpoet.com

Headshot: Roseanne Olson.

Photo Credit: Staff