JACOB BURGESS ROLLO

Mary Gartside’s Colour Splotch Diagrams 

In this theory of colour
we find pencil-lines arcing 
from the spots where 

watered pigments intersect 
so to point out the kind
of flowers one might paint,

and with which hue. I my-
self often waited to 
become a kind of flower: a 

blackjack dahlia that could 
quench a newly lit match
with its long latinate name.

What’s wonderful about 
theory is the way it frames
stagnation as an insistence 

on potential. I myself have 
no intention of moving from 
this bed, despite our alarm 

clock’s wittering. It’s cold 
outside and you’re basically 
the warmest thing there is. 

a little red pencil

    after Josef Albers’ Plate IV-1

It cannot actually be that hard
to push a pencil through a hand

if Harry seemed to manage find
in maths that once. Lauren’s palm

turned soft as margarine. But don’t go
on about the differences between 

after and before. After the art heist, 
you could see how bleached those 

walls really were, and you under-
stood the motive for the act. Post-

surgery, her hand was puckered 
like a mouth. Even the pencil looked 

a deeper shade of red beyond the 
wound. But this was an optical illusion.

The jam at the heart of every donut
is called the interior jam. And you 

know what they say: any stone can
skin the surface of a lake until there’s 

drought. Mid-song, Ozzy Osborne 
once reached out to catch and bite 

a bat, but it passed right through 
his fingers. Which is a metaphor for 

knowledge. Which is a reciprocal
kind of theft. I keep on 

overhearing the questions posed 
by adults to their kids. Like, 

what is the square root  
of forty-nine? Why do old people 

run like that? 
What would’ve happened to Little

Red Riding Hood if she’d only 
stayed at home? Might her red cloak 

have seemed heightened? No, I say 
in my grown-up voice, it mightn’t.

Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet from Dorset. His worth is published or forthcoming in The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Magma, fourteen poems, The Little Review, Basket and elsewhere.

Jacob wrote this about his poems:

Both ‘A Little Red Pencil’ and ‘Mary Gartside’s Colour Splotch Diagram’ came from a recent obsession with colour theory. The plates from Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color and the works of the eighteenth-century theorist Mary Gartside were produced, pragmatically, to illustrate facts about hue and value, but I wanted to treat them as artworks in their own right. The poems are both ekphrases of the art that happens before the final work, in anticipation of the ‘real art’, which gave me a language for talking about preparation and avoidance.