alley portrait aubade

“Such a mistake to want

            clarity above all things. What’s 

            a single night, especially 

            one like this, now so close to ending?”

            —“Moonless Night,” Louise Glück

He’s telling you about a woman’s

portrait he found in an alley,

now hanging on his bedroom wall 

beneath two guitars. You noticed 

it when he brought you inside, thought 

she was maybe a family member

from the late 1950s, this woman

in a blue blouse with a white 

Peter Pan collar, auburn hair curled 

around a face at once smiling and 

opaque. This man you’ve been 

seeing irregularly throughout the fall 

has invented a backstory where 

the woman is a housewife who 

signs up for a painting class and 

falls in love with her instructor. 

She isn’t happy with her husband, 

though you don’t remember why, 

and later, when you’re out on 

Milwaukee Avenue under a grey 

mid-morning sun, she’s still on your 

mind. And even later, on a bench

at a nearby cafe where you can’t 

decide if this is an aubade or not, 

you do remember that the woman 

went back to her husband, and after

years pass, her grown children find 

the portrait hidden in an attic. 

Of course, none of this really happened, 

he tells you, the last thing he said 

that night, dawn still hours away.

Jen Finstrom is both part-time faculty and staff at DePaul University. She was the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine for thirteen years, and recent publications include Dime Show Review, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, The Orange Couch, Rust + Moth, and Stirring, among others.