A Sunflower on Fire

16 × 20 inches
Acrylic on canvas
Satin varnish
Black wood gallery frame
May 2025

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A single sunflower is held delicately against a star-speckled void. Its petals ignite, curling toward a center that has become a quiet furnace.

The composition stages a fragile bloom against a cosmic void, where flickering flames hover in suspension. The blackened core anchors the scene, keeping the brightness from dissolving into infinite space.

Created alongside the poem in late May, Sunflower on Fire and these verses inspired and informed each other — a dialogue between image and language about fragility, resistance, and what it means to hold on inside the dark.

I’m Velcro rotting in emotional escrow.
Inside my body, feeling the gravity.
Pulled and pushed down—
Through the ground, I lose capacity.

Suspended in negative space,
I see white noise at this pace.
The silence is deafening, it’s cyclical,
Facing a reckoning, lost in the liminal.

Famished, following bread crumbs.
I see the door as my head numbs.
Left cracked, barely open,
With a song and no words spoken.

I finally felt visible, even coherent.
Invisible again, not even transparent.
Searching without being guided.
Fading without fully dying.

A ghost is what you made me.
At most, I’m always a maybe.