“We live in a rainbow of chaos.” – P. Cezanne

It begins with confusion. A friend forgets to set his alarm. We miss the morning train. In anger, you tear up tickets to the museum. In silence, I wonder if we will ever see Cezanne’s sketches.

Still, we somehow manage to arrive. 

We inhale the city: incense of roasting meat, rotting fruit, sewage. 

“Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn’t it?” – P. Cezanne

We step around the bodies of the sleeping and forsaken. 

Tableaus of pain unfold all around us. In front of the Satin Doll, where you can buy a lap dance for $10, two men scream into each other’s faces. At the base of a subway escalator, a man pleads with a woman not to leave him. Without looking back, she steps onto the escalator and rides up into the sunlight

Back at the hotel room, you curl around me like a carapace. Our bodies fit together perfectly. 

We speak of shit: of talking shit, keeping our shit in our pants, losing our shit. We imagine giant heaps of the stuff, steaming in the streets. I laugh so hard my eyes fill with tears. You smile, but I cannot wring laughter from you. 

“Right now, a moment of time is passing by. We must become that moment.” – P. Cezanne

There are more than a hundred sketches. We agree they are splendid.  But you like the gentle ones: Madame Cezanne sewing, the softness of a child’s cheek, mountains caped in cloud, stands of trees. I prefer murder and lust, splashes of red, the violence of a knife cutting into fruit. 

You wait for me outside the gallery. I find you filling your sketch book with windows and puddles and sky.

In the madhouse of a bookstore, I come upon you at the end of the alphabet. I am looking for Virginia Woolf. You are looking for Stephan Zweig. They are not so far apart. You kiss me on the mouth, my hands full of books.   

“Fruits like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading.” – P. Cezanne

Stepping over a vent in the sidewalk, my dress billows up around my waist. I look to see if anyone has noticed the middle-aged lady with the black lace underpants. But the crowds of people look right through me.

We buy some yogurt at the drug store. A bruised banana lies alone in a basket. This makes us both sad.

For dinner, we eat beets and goulash. The waitress’ face is round as a ball, just like Cezanne’s wife. The man at the next table speaks loudly of being swindled by Russian male strippers. “Where are you from?” he demands of the waitress. “Kazakhstan,” she whispers as she clears the plates.

“Tell me, do you think I’m going mad?” – P. Cezanne

I kiss the nape of your neck and ask you if you ever feel surges of love. You think I’m finding fault, suggesting you do not love me well enough. “There’s something wrong with me,” you say. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I say. “Someday you’ll just kick my carcass off a cliff,” you say. “Never,” I say. “I love your carcass.” “Perhaps I’m losing my mind,” you say. 

You are not the only one losing your mind.

A woman in the hotel lobby screams at the clerk. Threatens to call her bank, her lawyer, the police. Everyone stares as she is escorted out of the building, deposited on the stinking streets.  

Another man sits alone at a bus stop and lets loose an endless stream of curses. He addresses no one we can see. His voice breaks with the effort of dislodging so much rage. We can hear him for five blocks, until we enter the park and birdsong overtakes his sounds of pain.

“The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me.” – P. Cezanne

We step into Central Park and the city’s full-frontal assault falls away, replaced by a lake and trees and pigeons fighting over bread. 

We see a robin, his beak overflowing with paper wrappers, bits of plastic ribbon. We imagine a fantastic nest, spangled with human castoffs. 

Driving home, rain spatters the windshield. The sky is black, the sun orange. We head south and a sudden, shadowy rainbow illuminates our passage. 

You lift my hand to your lips. “I’m so glad I found you,” you say. As if I’d been lost to you. 

Eve Müller lives in Eugene, Oregon with her sweetheart. She has recently published in About Place, Camas, Contemporary Haibun Online, Marrow Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Sequestrum, and Timberline Review among others. Her work has been anthologized. She’s had two books published: Guide to the Ruins and Birds and Saints. She was awarded a PLAYA artists’ residency and won a Cirque poetry competition, and her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When Eve is not writing, she bakes, hikes, conducts research on autism, hangs out with her mom and two feral daughters, and skinny-dips whenever/wherever she can.