"Bad Annunciation"
—ca. 1500, Jean de Flanes
Click here to listen to Joanie Mackowski read this poem.
She's heard it too often before, waited in too many
rooms and dresses for each moon-
faced angel, each with a different approach.
This is the worst. The walls a botch
of brick, no window, not a thread
of drapery—the beams so low if Mary stood
she'd knock her head. Yet an inch
from her head hangs the dove, outstretched
in a pink and blue bubble: it will land in her hair.
But Mary doesn't care. She stares far
away, toward my knees and the rick-
rack edge of the rug in the gallery. She doesn't look
at the book, open in her lap. Not the usual book: it's a picture-
book, a museum catalog maybe, Four
Centuries of Annunciations—anyway, it's open
to a dime-sized, dim, and inverted replica of this same
painting here. How clever: a mirror in her lap,
like the pinprick infinite hope just plopped
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Joanie Mackowski is the author of View From a Temporary Window and The Zoo. She teaches at Cornell University.
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