Drawing Lesson #2

My pencil is fixed. Let’s avoid the metaphor where the page is the universe, and I am God, and the graphite to the white page is some explosion. Nothing “new” is going to happen here. At best it hasn’t been heard for a long time. At best everyone’s subconscious will render many different things based on the same model. But here is a pencil ready to flesh a mountain. I draw the pleats of it like vulva, I said pleats because you should see a skirt, those things because all mountains are on the female spectrum — if people are still married to that idea. The virtuosity in the depths and heights are just my idea of where the sun is and isn’t. And since I am a bad artist — light is all over the place like spilled olive oil. The mountain because — insurmountable; the olive oil because — the vulva: I should start testing my metaphors by analyzing how well they operate in reverse. The vulva is a mountain, olive oil is light, skirts are mountains: suddenly some things are not very true. I just want to delineate a space I can walk into and be done. There isn’t really a point in all this drawing, just to fashion an escape hatch into a useful solitude.

 

Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology, and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry And Poetics. Her work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Sugar House Review, and others. She is excited to have her work featured in The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, as she has been a fan for quite some time. @jessy_llayne

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The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.

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Jessica Lanay
Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology, and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry And Poetics. Her work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Sugar House Review, and others. She is excited to have her work featured in The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, as she has been a fan for quite some time.

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