Portrait of the Artist as a Prism
Everywhere she looks she breaks
her heart
pulling apart
everything for art
Peeling apart a moment
Thumbnails into orange flesh
a mist of citrus oil in the air
pith pulled away
pips separated from membrane
segments opened into the juicy pockets within
Rainbows flung across unsuspecting surfaces
as light is loosened into its constituent parts
Art is investigation
Observing with love
where what is known meets with what is not
The purest point where curiosity and imagination
clasp each other by the hand
before
the moment when they run
jumping together into the flat face of the prism
Inside
Where everything
IS
Understanding is a sort of violence
each wonder dissected and rearranged
not out of malice of course
a toddler smashing toys to see what’s inside
Delightedly
but violence nonetheless
All these wonders running headlong into the heart
of the prism
where they will break
but not just break
What is a prism
If not a chrysalis?
secretly
melting and rearranging
some new and
glorious creation?
By Ashley Williamson
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Ashley Williamson is an Arkansan poet living in the inspiring English Lake District. She attended the University of Oxford, where she earned a First-Class Diploma in Creative Writing in 2023. Her poetry won the Letter Review Poetry Prize and will be published in April 2026. Her pamphlet, Particles & Waves, was longlisted for the 2023 MsLexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and has appeared or is forthcoming in Mantis, BarBar, The Festival Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press, among others. She also works as a radiographic interpreter for her family’s aerospace testing business.
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Instagram: @penelaine
Website: www.ashleywilliamson.co.uk