"Guilin Landscape" Watercolor Anita Wong ’76
A native of Canton, China, Wichita artist Anita Wong exhibits her paintings locally, regionally and in Hong Kong. A member of Gallery XII, the Kansas Watercolor Society, Wichita Women Artists, the Artists Guild of Wichita and the Arts Partners, she frequently demonstrates the techniques of Chinese brush work and conducts workshops for the Wichita public schools through Arts Partners. Her artworks have been jurored into a number of the Kansas Watercolor Society’s seven-state exhibitions, including this year’s Great Eight Exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum.
“The Swoon” (Detail), Oil on panel, 21.5” x 17.5”, Brian W. Hinkle ’92
Wichita artist Brian Hinkle paints autobiographical images layered with art historical references. His interest in Flemish panel painting led him to study at New York’s Metropolitan Museum on a 2001 grant from the Kansas Cultural Trust. Assistant curator at The Wichita Center for the Arts, he also teaches drawing, painting, portraiture and enameling. “The Swoon” will be featured in the Bienalle Internazionale Dell’ Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy in December 2003.
Lullaby
a person is a narrative, / the strength of which is either / revelation or withholding.
— Albert Goldbarth
Sweet with mildew and leaf-rot,
A choked pump-filter chugs the same slow song
That plays where grout splits,
Where nail rust roots in powdering latex,
Where an Oldsmobile blossoms in oxides
Under a wrestle of hedge-gnarl and ivy, sinks
To its ferrous knees in a wrangle of clover and bullthistle, –
Or where a human hair traces its long fall
From scalp to brush bristle, to linoleum.
I sip coffee and watch as Miranda tidies
Her house, attacks the tatted spiderweb binding her
Ceiling to her wall, sweeps a battered feather
Duster over her well-thumbed books,
Then asks herself, out loud, what she has learned
That a cornstraw broom couldn’t
Have taught in half the time.
Matter scuffs in the corners of rooms – tumbleweeds
Of cat fur snowy with dust, mouse braille, lacy flakes
Of forgotten skin – the teeming caboodle of life
Slipping away to a quiet place . . .
Under the broken patio tiles, in a shimmer
Of nacreous clay, gray slugs repose.
What kind of thing do her children think her?
Soft in the head like firelight
Chewing a summer’s fallen twigs.
A husband dawdles in the garden
Shed with turf-rouged rakes and hoes.
From a back-room radio, Stan Getz whispers Desafinado
Over a drummer’s bossa-nova brushes.
She turns to me, lifts her coffee cup in a modest toast.
At last, she says, she’s turned
A kind of beetle, her home a carapace
Grown difficult to bear, the surfaces smoky
With the patina of long use –
And everything she used to be?
A thumb-smudge pledged to one last varnished door.
— John Jenkinson ’94/96
John Jenkinson teaches creative writing and literature at Butler County Community College, El Dorado, Kan. His poetry has won an AWP Intro/Journals Award and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
