Observer Effect

“Pink Haired Woman Merged” (11" x 18", pencil and acrylic on canvas, 2025) by Howard Skrill

We drag it around to laundromats and bars
like a cumbersome sac of potatoes. 
Prop it up in a bed, wait for it to heal, 
wait for ourselves
to get used to it:
sagging breasts, second chins, pimples.
Try to get somebody else to love it. Look,
here’s me, the canister I came in.
It used to be compact, easy on the eyes.
How free you could be without it, the spectator says,
how you drag this bag with you across the street, 
to that hive meant for honeybees. Its edges
are becoming tattered.
In the mirror, you find tan clenched skin
and crow’s feet against bruises twilight pounds into rickety night. 
Any hot silly breakfast as you finish oatmeal or a banana 
at the height of summer, perhaps a deodorant commercial 
or a Beyoncé song playing, the container, frayed
will overstretch its worn out sides and iron itself.
Throw it out with the pizza boxes, the spectator says.
Do we follow instructions?  
No. We speak to it, deceive it, repeat:
Be you again. Get your act together again. Be me. I was so
heart-stoppingly
beautiful.

About the Author

Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.

about the artist

Howard Skrill is an artist/educator and a long-term resident of Brooklyn, NY with a BFA from Suny-Purchase and an MFA from CUNY-Queens College. His art projects are included in the 2026 exhibition “Democracy Jenga” at Puffin Brooklyn, “Chaotic Memory” in April/May 2024 at the Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, NY, and a solo exhibition entitled “Monumental Follies” at the Fairfield University Art Museum 2020. He also has group exhibitions such as the SECAC 2023 in Richmond, Va., “Who Writes History” at ArtsWestchester in 2022, “Darkest Before Dawn” at Kube Beacon in 2022, “!!PUBLIC ART???” at Ramapo College in 2019, and “Public Discourse” at the Riverview Art Center in Lynchburg, Va in 2019. Works have appeared as covers of seven magazines such as Carolina Quarterly in Winter 2021. Pictorial essays such as “Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm” have been published in Spring 2023, “Death Wish” in 2020 and “Erasure” in 2015.