Figure Study (2023)

Sweetened-up strings hold fast to your fingers—you hear resonance like a false harmonic when they unstick. You hammer wrought-iron fingertips into its long neck’s ebony; the vibration through your knuckles rings familiar and mechanical.  Its voice is husky and doleful like a drowsy lover.

Punctuating your collective frustration, you draw the bow in a quick chop in front of the bridge. You peer through its f-hole (you’re intimate).  Amidst wisps of dust hides a deceased Czech’s last name and a serial number tracing to an old tome. You blow into it, but nothing will ever escape its chambers.

Pizzicato feels like raindrops falling on your fingers. A little warped like you, it wears the grey gum of centuries; its pegs only budge after a thick coat of graphite or lipstick. Maybe she’s born with it, or maybe it’s Maybelline.

In its satin-lined coffin are a tin of Pirastro rosin and a plastic tube keeping a humidifier nonsensically dry. On a velour bed, a rogue piece of music which had been pressed into the strings’ form after having the lid shut on top multiple times. Between a good bow and a heavy one that murders your knotty fingers, a picture of you and your little sister at a pumpkin farm in 1996.

It is made a member of the family, its scroll a binding ketubah. Costly as marriage, the thought of losing it gives you the same anxiety as being served divorce papers. Buying and selling it ends here, and it will be buried with you, like an ancient pet in its sarcophagus.