‘Venus in Art Therapy’
— Hannah Cohen
The self is a house that can only be abandoned once.
Today’s poem was written by someone who already delivers so much to the poetry reading community through her website Fork and Page—a book review site where poetry collections are arranged in a flavorful and thoughtful composition alongside plates of food and sprigs of flowers. With such an eye for color and balance, Anita Olivia Koester’s passion perfectly translates to this imagined prose-like poem about the goddess of love “opening and closing like a cactus flower” in an art therapy session.
What I love about this poem is how down-to-earth Venus is, how I too relate to the “state of endless falling” of experience with men. There’s pain and hurt in the poem’s emotional background, but it’s never one-dimensional. It’s because of lines like “[a]ll that’s left of the shutters and doors are golden / hinges gleaming in sunlight” that damages us as deeply as it does, but not without eventual repair.