by Jessica Willingham

I want to crawl inside Georgia O’Keefe’s tunic, smell paint and Santa Fe, hot-bake desert sun, shed snakeskin, tin windmill breeze, lilies. I wonder if she’d take that belt off and whoop me or whisper, come here, closer, lady. What do you think of pink? And I’d tell her it’s brilliant—stuck forever in my mind as chewed bubblegum on cactus. It’s a beautiful pink, pink melty sunset primordial ooze. The color original. The comeback kid. The hopeful. She’d let me stay—the long snow frosted plains black night—say, you can borrow a kimono, but don’t you dare touch the brushes, lest you tell the whole world what we know.

Jessica Willingham has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology, Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her debut poetry collection was named a semi-finalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Belle Point Press (2026). Her work appears in Hell is Real: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, Identity Theory, Roi Faineant Press, Still: The Journal, Mississippi Review, and Variant Literature, among others. She lives in Oklahoma.