They called me an artist,
but I strip-searched their paintings from head to toe
and all I could find were oil figure blue prints
of someone else's tear shells,
as if they had no feeling left to colour.

So I pastelled over their maquillage faces,
drawing new scales of fingertips and scraped knees--
Limbs they never knew existed.
Some that didn't anyway.

They painted back my lipstick
and called me an artist.

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