3 Poems by Claire Christoff

Case Study House No. 8 

Charles and Ray Eames, 1949

Pacific Palisades

The walls are sneaker-bright—Mondrian

cubes rendered in lead oxide. Once

the baby can stand in her crib, she peels

away the pigment in flakes like coconut. 

She will one day slick her limbs with oil,

lay under the Santa Monica sun until

melanomas appear like chocolate drops.

She will drink Tab until they stop making it.

And like everything that ended up being

bad for everybody, lead paint, in all its

vividness, was so good for a little while.

She may never again occupy a room

so alive with color and sweetness. She

may now be entitled to compensation.

Case Study House No. 9 

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, 1950

Pacific Palisades

Picture it: two girls, sitting in a glass box.

The one with the yellow hair is looking

out. The other is looking stoned, staring

at the canvas—lung-pink undergirded 

by maroon, reminiscent of the insides

of things—above the mantle. Rothko

himself said that “silence is so accurate.”

This is the kind of statement that sounds

inscrutably profound, but if you think

about it too much, it begins only to sound

inscrutable. The orange credenza

and the bleeding half-moons of the girls’

nails begin to seem suspect. If silence

is accurate, noise, then, must be wrong.

Case Study House No. 20A

Richard Neutra, 1948

Pacific Palisades

Consider the nameless Umbrian artists 

and their Madonnas—the same downcast 

eyes and chaste lips, painted again 

and again like indulgences. Five

centuries later, Dalí pierced the Virgin’s

chest with light. He crowned her

with seashells, shot her into negative

space, and the Pope liked it. Think, now,

of the two-bedroom American house, built

a million times over. Cartoon chimney,

Bradford pear: a child’s drawing. But

the future is here. It smells like 

new polyester and the bluegum

branches skulking by the pool.

Claire Christoff is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Illinois. She received both her BA and MA in English at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, where she also taught first-year composition. Her recent work has appeared in Passages North, Grist, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

6 December 2021