(for Georgia O’Keeffe)

Levi’s folded up to

your knees

grin stretched across

your broad

sun-baked face,

hitching a ride into

Abiquiu for

canvas and

cigarettes –

you climb onto the

belching beast,

hold tightly

to the driver’s back

feel every

muscle ripple

beneath his

t-shirt and

watch the desert

fly by around you

wild and free

just like you

paint it.

Jennifer L. Gauthier is a professor of media and culture at Randolph College in Virginia. Her poems are published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, South 85, Gyroscope Review, Nightingale & Sparrow, The Bookends Review, little somethings press, HerWords Magazine and Tofu Ink Arts Press. Her media commentary appears on Pop Matters, in Mayday Magazine and The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture. Her poetry collection, naked: poems inspired by remarkable women (November 2021) is part of Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices series. She has a story included in the short fiction anthology, Draw Down the Moon (Propertius Press, 2022).