Jesse Lee Kercheval

In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

A portrait of Nan from American Gothic by Grant Wood. She is blonde with blue eyes and sits on a red chair.

Portrait of Nan by Grant Wood, 1933

Image credit: Grant Wood

Peach

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

The blond woman sits in the ladder-back chair, her blond hair marceled, her lips touched with red lipstick. Creases on either side of her mouth. Lips firmly shut. White blouse with black circles, her skirt black as the chair, her bare arms leading my eyes down to the hands resting in her lap. The walls are half-covered in a swath of heavy blue curtain: All life’s a stage.

I look at her blue eyes. Then the rippling waves in her hair, set with electricity and unnatural heat. I see the pallor of her bare arms, the almost painful sinew in her elbow, the long fingers. Only then do I see the chick standing upright on her palm, fierce little bird. Only then, the peach in the other, her fingers curling around soft fuzz. Life stilled. But the shadow of the curtain says the sun’s going down. Why does the chick just stand there, his two legs like wires? Are her fingers bruising the peach?

Her brother painted her portrait as an apology. After Nan posed as the farmwife in American Gothic, Time magazine called her ugly. Nan, his favorite sister. Nan, the golden chick of the family. The peach. She does not look as if she trusts him to do right by her this time. She does not look like she is enjoying this at all.

Before he started, he told her to sit perfectly still. After he finished, she got on with her life. Surely, she wished she could blink. Surely, the smell of the oil paint and turpentine made her eyes water. Surely, the chick was peeping. Surely, she felt the peach softening toward rotten as she held it as gently as she could. Was the chick thinking, In six months, I’ll be dinner. I admit I do not find Nan beautiful in this portrait. Was her brother’s apology enough?

What painting, what poem is ever apology enough?

Jesse Lee Kercheval (she/her) is a writer, translator, and artist. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023) and America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Books, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize. She is also the author of the memoir, Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the graphic memoir, French Girl, which the Washington Post named one of the Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2024.