The early 1670s. Snow descends like quiet thoughts. Antonie nibbles
on sugary fresh-baked speculaas, as Johannes sips
upon an earthen cup of java, ponders the tumultuous scene buried
behind the master’s easel, throngs of rapt observers
craning their necks to glimpse Rembrandt’s fictionalized dissection.
In 1675, the famed microscopist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek,
an admiring peer of the painter Johannes Vermeer, will be tasked
with executing the latter’s will; but now, Johannes confides
he wishes he’d examined that aftermath of the execution of Aris Kindt,
hanged in 1632 for the unpardonable 17th-century crime
of Armed Robbery. In The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,
Kindt lies pale, draped — for privacy’s sake — by a swatch
of creamy folded cloth, as a metallic slicing instrument neglects
its customary starting point upon the decedent’s thorax
in favor of a flayed left arm — the sinister origin of his delinquency —
as doughnut-collared surgeons huddle by the ashen cadaver,
prize their pockets’ lessened weight as the price to be portrayed,
memorialized in somber shades for centuries to come.
Johannes suggests they sneak back into the stuffy boardroom
of the Guild of Surgeons, add in a few pearl earrings
& an exotic headdress, apply Antonie’s optical lenses
to identify the swarms of microscopic infusoria floating through
a trail of condensation in Kindt’s R-shaped bellybutton.
A seconds-held stare. Then, rumbling belly laughs, both well-aware
such flagrant acts might turn them, too, into breathless subjects
for a future master’s brushstrokes, as two more geniuses are formed.
Jonathan Greenhause makes a living turning English into Spanish and Spanish into English, sharing a small home with his wife and two children. His collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and he was the winner of the 2025 Goldsmith Poetry Festival Competition and the 2024 Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, the minnesota review, Permafrost, Puerto del Sol, and Southword. This is his second time appearing in Solstice.
