A Life as a List of Figures
Shannon K. Winston
Fig.1. In 1799, a baby girl is born. Her hands curl around her mother’s. The girl presses her cheek up to her mother’s breast. Did the baby sense, even then, that she’d soon be motherless?
Fig. 2. Paper zebras, seashells, elephants taped to the nursery windows. The baby’s father— a zoologist, chemist, and mineralogist— hoped they’d watch over her.
Fig. 3. This child: Anna Atkins (née Anna Childs). Her first steps: to the garden, the sea. Her first word: amaryllis, which flourished in England the year she was born.
Fig. 4. Seashells clank in a metal bucket. The cockle: heart-shaped. The murex: a prickled spine. The banded tulip: a swirl of browns as fine as a cuticle. The young woman engraves them one by one. Illustrations for Lamarck’s genera of shells (c. 1831).
Fig. 5. Eye against pinhole; splinter in thumb. The woman holds a wooden box. A camera obscura. A birthday gift from her father (c. 1841).
Fig. 6. Hunched over glass, the woman waits: for sunlight, for time, for algae to imprint paper. Her skin stings with ammonium citrate.
Fig. 7. Patience is silence, emptiness.
Fig. 8. Error, trial, error. Vision, revision. Time sputters on. Does the woman think of her mother?
Fig. 9. Too much sunlight, blurred seaweed, too much white. Too much blue. The woman needs sleep. Sweat sours her dress.
Fig. 10. Each plate: a label, scientific name. Looseleaf, they pile on her desk. Did her father say he was proud of her?
Fig. 11. 1843-1853: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. First illustrated book.
14 copies, each book bound with a white string. Gifts for her botanical friends.
Fig. 12. She dedicates this book: My dearest father. From the preface: I hope the impressions will be found sharp and well defined.
Fig. 13. Did she need recognition or was the work enough? Her signature: AA [Anonymous Amateur].
Fig. 14. What she doesn’t write: it all vanishes so quickly. Instead, she leaves a big white space.
Note: Italics indicate phrases or sentences taken directly from Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives in Bloomington, IN. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com.
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