Take Your Daughter to Work Day
Hewlett Packard, ca. 1993

On the computer
a tremendous list
longer than any
human could read.
You could look at
anything, almost
anything in the world.
I had ballet tights
under my overalls.
I chose Degas.
Musée d’Orsay. Paris!
The pictures were
so close and bright,
it was like going
there. My dad left
for a meeting and
I swiveled in
his chair, peering
at blue-green tutus,
the wispy buns
at the napes
of their swan-necks.
Their sunlit ateliers.
I was heavy
into beauty.
I wanted to know
how it worked.
I made the painting
bigger and bigger, till
the tacked tulle
layers were a blur
of blue-grey squares.

Hannah Faith Notess is a Seattle-based poet and author of The Multitude (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2015).