Finger Paint
I.
I was seven when Dad drove his car through my puddled driveway Louvre.
The paintings pooled lightly and splattered toward the sky in an oil slick rainbow of Tickle Me Pink, Robin’s Egg Blue, and Macaroni and Cheese. I chased madly after his car (which I caught Wild Strawberry-handed torpedoing my artwork) but ultimately retired to watching the newly blotted paint on my hands curl up, crack dry, and set in the sinuous canals of my fingerprint.
II.
When I was fifteen, I hated the word beautiful.
I carried black paint gobs on my fingertips, ready to tuck my initials between every rose petal I could find. I smeared a warm gray lovingly across dewy rainbows. I festooned silver linings and happily ever afters with syrupy youth, with soupy childhood.
Beautiful would have been a good way to put it all.
III.
My art teacher thinks that finger painting is taboo, that it’s too dangerous, too intimate.
So I was force-fed a paintbrush. It turns paintings to photographs, distressed slashes to remote, ratioed spheres. I long, though, to finger paint it all because sometimes beautiful isn’t enough. I don’t want to be intimate through haggard hieroglyphics, through fatigued phonetics.
Art should be searingly imperfect; poems should be finger painted.
• • •
Emily Bornstein is a senior in high school from Long Island, New York. She is presently the editor-in-chief of her high school’s literary magazine and the school newspaper. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Packingtown Review, The Lascaux Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Steam Ticket.