Mismatched Room by Kathleen Fellows

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Porträt der Frau Charpentier und ihre Kinder by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1878)

Mismatched Room by Kathleen Fellows

The dog scowls at the lazy humans.

That improper boy resembling a girl

with hair grown past his shoulders and onto

dangerous territory past his neck

where a proper boy would never let it.

The dog is agitated for his back

where the human boy is perched, privileged.

The dog matches Madame Carpenter’s dress,

colorfully black, white, and too puffed.

She casually and uncomfortably sits

as if she were waiting on an interview.

She displays her ambiguous children

with a neutral expression and a hand,

closed and adorned wit heavy gold

from an unknown man, or maybe herself.

The dog hates the carpet on which he lays.

Even without a good sight for color,

he notices the clash of the styles

he sees the western and eastern Asian,

he senses the modern and classical.

Nothing had been placed with good intensions.

The dog wishes the room would unclutter.

A table has been shoved into the room

and piled with vases and golden food

that screams the woman’s class attention needs

and forces it into a visitor.

If only he could disassociate

himself with that lifeless, rag of a dress

worn by that woman who mixes styles

and parades her boys around in blue frills.