A boy answers the door, though no one knocked
and the door hadn’t asked a question.  

Outside, sun is everywhere and gorgeous, the kind of sun 
one might imagine while masturbating if indeed

one thought of suns that way. Inside, ten dim spotlights 
do their best to illume each sort of framed intention:  

obligatory boat adrift against a ravaged sky; 
brown rabbit with leather cord knotted at his neck;  

curly-locked, doe-eyed girl 
who evermore saw herself

outside the painting with those same 
silken ringlets, those ruminant orbs,

even though her hair went to seed
after her first pregnancy. 

There is no uniform answer for why 
the boy returns to the gallery, sits 

on its single hard bench, gazes and gazes, 
and sometimes hums, but I like to think 

it is the girl who keeps him there—the ribbon 
in her hair unspooling like a siren song, 

her eyes asking nothing of him, except to see. 

MARY CROCKETT HILL is the author of A Theory of Everything, winner of the Autumn House Prize, and If You Return Home with Food, winner of the Bluestem Poetry Award. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Boston Review, Poetry Daily and Best of the Net, among others. As Mary Crockett, she writes fiction for children and young adults--most recently the novel How She Died, How I Lived. Mary teaches creative writing at Roanoke College and edits Roanoke Review. You can find her on the web: marycrocketthill.com, Twitter: @MaryLovesBooks, or Instagram: @marycrockettwriter