21

flesh color     absence
     lineation     and left 

alone in favor of foliage 
clogging foreground 

     my inaccuracies 
never become forests 

like this    winter helps 
the artist covet sky less

     it’s honest     a gray 
third     call it good

Justin Runge is the author of Plainsight (New Michigan Press, 2012) and Hum Decode (Greying Ghost Press, 2014). His criticism has been featured by Black Warrior Review and Pleiades, and his poetry has been published in Best New Poets 2013, Cincinnati Review, Sycamore Review, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and other journals.

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Editor’s note: This poem responds to a piece in Andrew Wyeth’s “The Helga Pictures,” a collection of over 240 images in a variety of media that depict a single subject, Wyeth’s neighbor and friend Helga Testorf. Read other pieces from “In the Orchard” at The Maynard and Sons and Daughters.

[image: In the Orchard (Helga in orchard) 1972 | Andrew Wyeth]