Dorothea Tanning’s Tempest in Yellow (1946)

by James Pate

I took a course not on happiness but on varied forms of desolate ecstasy. This was a while ago, when cicadas still rattled in our branches. I was younger than, with longer hair and louder thoughts. The teacher stood with her back to us and the windows as the yellow weather sprouted out among the clouds, loosening from its haze-hems an even fuller storm. We spent so many of those mornings at the drive-in, the tall screens flickering with the specters of basement films. A doomsday clock cloaked in velvet hung from the rafters. I had painted the side of my face I knew less well. As in Genet, seeming opposites coalesced. Scarred hairy knuckles dissolved into the memory of baroque rose banquets oozing with fresh stigmata. Under the window, a friend spoke of an eclipse where the last curve of daylight burned only brighter.

James Pate has had work published in Black Warrior Review, Heavy Feather Review, Ligeia, Coffin Bell, Oculus Sinister: An Anthology of Ocular Horror and Occulum, among other places. His books include the poetry collections The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Mineral Planet (Schism Neuronics), and the essay collection Flowers Among the Carrion (Action Books Salvo Series).

Image credit:

Hippolyte Baraduc, “Iconography, produced following the method of psychic projection.” from The Human Soul. Paris : Librairie internationale de la pensée nouvelle, 1913. Available at: https://www.archive.org