Picasso's Mistress by Hazel Frankel
![[Reclining Woman by Rachel Deacon]](reclining-woman.jpg)
Which one you might well ask,
so I'll give you my credentials.
I was his model
after he saw me at the Lapin Agile in Montmatre.
That sounds glamorous,
but it really isn't anything more than the local pub.
I see that you look at me askance;
your questioning eyes undress me and I blush:
I am only a naive country girl, after all.
You are wondering
if my right breast really does overlay my left;
whether I squint in the glass
at my nutcracker nose;
and what he was thinking
when he laid those thick black lines
around my seductive curves,
flattening me out.
Still, he painted me ugly but made me feel beautiful
when he told me to twist my body a little more to the side;
to let my neck tip so that my long hair would fall down my back;
as he ran his eyes over my skin and his brush along my spine.
Who knows what he saw when he looked at me?
Did he think this progression of geometrical shapes
would emphasise my bone structure?
Yet he made me his own in those pictures,
and who else but he could get me such a wide audience?
BIO: Hazel Frankel lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, within ten kilometres of where she was born. A practising artist, calligrapher and teacher, Hazel has recently completed the MA Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. To date, her poems have appeared in Carapace, Jewish Affairs, Jewish Quarterly, Coffee House Poetry and Iota. Hazel's first collection 'Drawing from Memory' will be published by Cinnamon Press (UK) in 2007. EMAIL: comments@moondance.org