13/30

The sides of coated bodies split apart.
A street artist bursts forth with
portraits of pastel celebrities and
sketched consumers
who did not, could not, want to foot the
couple of dollars for this real street art.
With large clown eyebrows, clown smiles and
clown teeth I was beginning to wonder
why the world was seen this way. Such large
foreheads would have certainly screened a big
enough flashing marquee of something
really witty, really poetic and really just-that-thing-
that-makes-you-go-ahhhhh buuurrrnnnned you. Right?
But it’s really a burn against humanity.
He caught me on a day where I gave up
and gave in
just long enough to listen to him spinning
all the necessary shit jargon.
A sales pitch to preserve a moment at intersections.
Before I could realize the scale of the distance between easel and chair
he managed to capture a sucker
in a tight denim number and like some
ring master howled “Behold! Behold! Behold!”
With pastels in all the folds of his fingers he
spun vehemently to view his sucker in the tight denim number.
Yet, in all his beholding
the pastels flew out of his hand. A pastel flew right into the
crook of my elbow. The white one too.
He chuckled at his own antics and asked for the pastel back.
White he said was the most important,
because it highlighted all the dark that could not be seen. But
I didn’t want to return to him his pastel. I wanted him
to suffer a real humiliation. A real struggle to fight
for his so-called street art. I must have said something
about the color black, because he returned to the easel
without his white.
In silence he began with vast quick strokes. A near
knowable face formed and the sucker in the tight denim number
had already left. The man wielding
pastels didn’t even notice. He finished by ripping the
large notepad like paper off the board and holding it
in front of my face.
A face to my likeness was staring back at me. But staring
upward and slightly to the left. Huge jewels or flattened kisses
seemed as if they were falling from the whites of my eyes. These droplets
somehow collected at the bottom of the page and were rising. My near
likeness of a mouth began to suffer for breath.
With a crowd gathering and a hard grip
he took back the white pastel and left
the drowning portrait at my feet.
He said, “This is what you won’t do, but maybe
it’s what you need to do. Not me. Not at this intersection.
Not on this day.” He scratched his chin
and returned to his easel shouting
to every passerby “Behold! Behold! Behold!” -sonja lynn mata