After Portrait of Jacqueline by Pablo Picasso (1960, Private collection)

None of your muses had awakened the nostalgia of your early blue in midst of broken lines like your last love, Jacqueline, who stirred such cerulean emotions. With wings folded like a trapped butterfly, she has become a coded geography, a cipher transfixed in angular lines. A wide-open eye stares at the movements of your brush: the other, minute like an olive sinking into an eyelet winks at your muted thoughts as it floats inside your dry martini whose stem forms the ridge of her nose. Is it because some butterflies hear with their wings that her feathered eyebrows extend into veined wings filling her head with stories, perhaps told by elves whispering in her ear?

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth(Press 53 2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award;Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the International Book Award. A seventeen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/