An extract from ‘The Conversation’
Jo Burns & Emily Cooper
MTW: Marie-Thérèse Walter (13 July 1909 – 20 October 1977) was the French lover and model of Pablo Picasso from 1927 to about 1935. Their relationship began when she was seventeen years old; he was forty-five and still living with his first wife, Olga. It ended when Picasso began his next relationship with the artist Dora Maar. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse committed suicide, four years after Picasso’s death. (Voiced by Jo Burns)
DM: Henriette Theodora Markovitch (22 November 1907 – 16 July 1997), known as Dora Maar, was a renowned surrealist French photographer, painter and poet. Dora and Picasso were together for nine years until Picasso began a relationship with Françoise Gilot. Dora continued painting and photography until she died at eighty-nine years old. (Voiced by Emily Cooper)
Sketch of a Mistress
MTW
Dora, it’s not easy to be wrenched away.
I wonder if you happily cultivated
your image, as a renowned
stealer of rings, your shiny conquests.
Did you relish the scandal?
I’m no judge, I hardly did any different
so what is it that gives the impression
that you aren’t averse to side-shows
or even the label homewrecker?
I became accustomed to that insult once,
from Olga. I learnt that three are a tiding,
a charm, and a gulp. I weighed whens, not whys
in my beak and, for a while became expert
in dark arts. I learnt to mimic the ways
of a thief, his tricks-in-flight, his evening habits.
And I wonder if, on overcast nights,
your nape also plumes, aching for dawn,
or your scapulars for an honest man.
Having been wrenched away, to be painted
as someone you’re not, is to understand
you were only a decoy from the very start.
Sometimes I imagine you scavenging
illusions of grandeur, fed wriggling lie by lie
to keep you in his wicker cage until you find
that glimmer has no bones to pick on.
Double Exposure
DM
Marie-Thérèse,
It is important to face yourself face on
Do not shy away from your own reflection
Perhaps if you took the time to wrestle
With yourself. Heels of your palms hard
Against the splintered wood of the studio floor
Scraping up the monochrome oils
With your pointing finger. Because each
Of your fingers is a pointing finger when
You make a fist. Contrast yourself
Against yourself. Paint the background first
Allow the image to reveal itself. You don’t
Have to try quite so hard. Capture it
The moment it has happened. Too late
Development is inevitable in this light
Fist-Fight in Front of Guernica
MTW
Dora, what hurt me was not your fists
or even him in your clutch.
It was his passivity as we hissed
at each other. He’d told me before
about Guernica; how it was for me,
the extent of his love. I’d accepted his use
of my blood, but still...
A woman knows when something is up.
The one in his new work was elegant, sharp,
sleek and dark. And here you were, claiming
it all. I asked him Pablo, which one of us leaves?
and he weighed me, gentle, against you, smart.
Dora, you know he refused to decide;
not truly yours but no longer mine.
We grappled, writhed. But what’s a few bruises
compared to being drawn as you die slowly?
More painful than those new sketches of me;
increasingly ugly, pastelled and blurred,
was my victimhood, portrayed by him
contrasted with glamour and monochrome.
And then the smirk as you and I bled;
The choicest experience of my life, he said.
Dora, can you imagine yet how it feels
to see through art how undesired you are?
A Ring with a Spike Inside
DM
On balance there was and is no harmony
Things observed are never owned
The light that touched the canvas
Left again, there are no scuff marks
On the floor
I cleaned my nails of you
We were collected
You and I
Projected onto white emulsion walls
It is a job in itself shaking loose
I consider writing you a letter
Instead I send him a rusty spade
I have furrowed deep enough inside
Your head, I will always be the other
JO BURNS was born in County Derry and now lives in Germany. The author of Circling for Gods (Eyewear Publishing), White Horses and Brink (both Turas Press), Jo has won the Magma Poetry Competition, the Irish Writers’ Festival Shirley McClure Prize, the Wild Word New Irish Writing in Germany Award, The Listowel Poetry Prize and The Poetry Society UK Hamish Canham Poetry Prize. Her collaborative collection titled The Conversation, written together with Emily Cooper and published by Doire Press, was published in April 2024.
EMILY COOPER is a poet and writer based in Donegal. Her poetry and prose has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Winter Papers and The London Magazine, among others. A 2019 recipient of the Arts Council Next Generation Award, Emily’s poetry debut, Glass, was published by Makina Books in 2021. In April 2024, The Conversation, written in collaboration with Jo Burns, was published by Doire Press. She is also co-founder and an editor for The Pig’s Back literary journal.
