Wednesday, August 16, 2023

BRUSH WITH BRAVERY FROM 4,500 MILES

by Becky DeVito


“Walk Through Claude’s Gardens” by Tatyana Pchelnikova.
Tatyana Pchelnikova’s website of original art.
Tatyana Pchelnikova at Made for Bravery.
Tatyana Pchelnikova on Instagram.


I’m on my second of four cups of gunpowder 

green tea and here’s a tweet from Zelenskyy

now there’s Made With Bravery, an online shop 

where anyone with a Visa card 

can make a miniscule contribution to the war. 

I don’t like to brag but if online shopping 

were a competitive sport I could medal 

in the cool stuff at a good price event, so let’s get to it: 

vyshyvanka shirts—I could wear one of those. 

Such a flattering cut, but the stitching sprouts all over. 

Look at this men’s vyshyvanka. Simplicity 

is elegance, right? No one to buy it for 

but why should that stop me? The sleeves 

would be too long and perhaps they’d snicker 

at my cross-dressing. I don’t think I’d care 

much about that but then there are folks 

who would think culturally illiterate

and so many already think that goes with American

so I can’t buy one of those. T-shirts are okay but 

I can’t wear yellow near my face and hey—

there’s an art category and that’s perfect. 

I won’t have to worry about the size, but the shipping! 

And international—better not think about it 

or I’ll never get to the finish line. 

 

That abstract painting with every shade 

of pink and green and all those textures…

which I can always return to later. Scroll down to a riot 

of flowers. I mean, a peaceful demonstration. 

That word is used inappropriately so often. Crowded, 

standing together. Reds and yellows and purples shout 

over each other, but they have something substantial to say.

About joy, or the need to let all your color catapult 

you into the next dimension and whatever shape that takes, 

I could use reminding. Click and it’s Walk 

Through Claude’s Gardens, and I believe it. 

Those petals curl right off the canvas the oil is so thick 

and wait, this is an oil painting, not a print? 

I’ve never owned an oil painting. Maybe I can afford it—

yes, $247 is something I can do, especially for an original.

How big is 50*50 cm, anyway? Another tab to convert 

centimeters to inches, 20x20, that’s a nice size 

and I definitely love it. Have to have it. 

 

Put in my address: why can’t Chrome translate 

the countries in the dropdown list? I’ve seen США 

so many times in the tweets but it would be a shame 

if it got sent to the wrong country. 

Google Translate says I was right 

and I’d better be, after 6 ½ months 

of keeping up with this war 

that was supposedly never again

and why won’t they let me specify my state? 

I guess it could arrive with only the zip. I want it. 

I put in my Visa number and the next screen 

isn’t in dollars anymore but UAH. 

 

Whoa, that’s a lot of digits 

so another tab for a currency converter 

and yes it’s right so I press Pay and it says 

I still need to make the payment for my order. 

At least they’re recognizing I have an order. 

I call the number on the back of the card 

and plug my other ear to hear the voice from India 

say nothing was declined, nothing was purchased 

today and they would know even if it was a minute ago 

so I have to solve it through the site. I email 

and ask if someone could have bought it 

during the cup of tea between when I started 

putting in my address and when I pressed Pay 

and so could I commission a similar one 

and I’d better get this taken care of soon 

because if she sells her entire stock on the first day 

it won’t be long before they’re four times the price. 

Good for her, but I’ll be shut out 

and there are so few occasions to join 

this awful war from 4,500 miles away 

and it’s not in my cart so I really hope 

it’s being saved in cyberspace  

while the customer service people wade 

through the backlog including three emails 

from me and that painting would 

fill the beige void I get sucked into 

for every virtual meeting 

much better than this starting-to-get-long 

black-and-white poem. 

 

By now they’re all struggling to sleep 

through air raid sirens because the Russian army 

thinks they’re making gains when they lob 

their missiles at apartment buildings, but those HIMARS 

we sent have been really good at shooting 

rockets out of the sky so maybe none will land near her 

tonight and Kyiv is 7 hours ahead of Connecticut 

so I hope when I wake 

there will be more than the automatic reply from Bravery 

waiting for me here in my inbox. Hold on—

how did this fraud alert slip in? 

Yes, I recognize that purchase. 

Why did it take eight hours 

when the lady from the credit card company 

said it would have shown up instantly? 

 

Thank God I left the tab open 

after I kept telling it to Pay 

because I can’t find the painting on the site 

anymore but they’re still trying to fingerprint my browser

from hours before so I reload and press Pay 

and it doesn’t work the first time but 

reload that sucker again and 

Wahoo! I’m the new owner of actual art 

and look I got it done before midnight 

and wow she must have been just as frazzled 

because it’s only 6:46 am there 

and here’s the shipping label, all ready to go. 

Tatyana Pchelnikova, you’re amazing. 

I subscribed for updates because I have another 

empty wall and you’ll be my go-to artist 

even after the invaders 

have had enough of their genocidal nonsense. 

 

Becky DeVito is pleased to report subsequent purchases at Made With Bravery have gone much more smoothly, including the names of countries appearing in English in the dropdown list. Becky DeVito has used poetry as a means of working her way through trauma. Her experiences writing poetry led her to investigate the ways in which poets come to new insights through the process of drafting and revising their poems for her doctoral dissertation. She is a professor of psychology at the Capital campus of CT State Community College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Frogpond, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Naugatuck River Review, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, and othersJoin her on TwitterFacebook or Instagram