NVN Wednesday: 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.
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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.
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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 others. Join her on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.