I've been picking at my nails again.
I look from my own hands to the one nailed to the wall.
Now, that's the hand of an artist.
She was dedicated enough to gnaw
all the way through the bones of her fingertips,
decide she didn't like it after all,
and remove the hand entirely.
The blood from each finger stump is gold,
the blood of an artist.
But the blood crusted around my shredded fingernails is brown,
just brown.
Artists are very different from humans.
Emily Dickinson's reclusiveness was a historical event,
while mine is just something to be whispered about
while I'm in the next room
pretending to work on a masterpiece.