Five words open the poem, and they sound like a small announcement made over coffee: "I'm going back to makeup." The phrasing is worth a second look. The speaker doesn't say "putting on" or "wearing" makeup but going back *to* it, as if returning to an old acquaintance or a town once lived in. Whatever made the speaker leave it behind, the poem is about coming back on new terms.
Most of the poem defines those terms by saying what they are not. Two negatives come first, then a pivot on the word "Just." The first "Not" brings up the speaker's younger self: "the kerfuffle of my youth, / with eyeliner cattywumpus / to each brow." Both words are comic and bouncy, and they are a pleasure to say aloud. "Kerfuffle" means a fuss, and "cattywumpus" (a spelling variant of a word meaning askew) makes the eyeliner sound as if it has wandered off the face. The tone is fond rather than scornful. The speaker laughs at the clumsy experiments of youth without sneering at them. The short line "to each brow" lands with a little thud, which suits the image of a line drawn just slightly wrong.
The second "Not" is more serious: "a sad attempt to erase / my decades on the road." The word "erase" belongs to drawing and correction, and it frames makeup as a way of rubbing out the past. The speaker refuses that idea. "Decades on the road" can be read literally, as years of travel, or figuratively, as a long life, and the poem doesn't choose between them. Either way, the speaker counts those years as something earned, and the refusal to "erase" them is also a refusal to be embarrassed by them. Calling the erasing attempt "sad" is a quiet jab at the idea that makeup in later life must be a cover-up.
The final two lines show the alternative: "Just a streak of red on the lip, / a little taupe along the lid." The language shrinks to match what it describes. Count the syllables in "a streak of red on the lip" and you find that every word is a single beat. The earlier lines tumbled through long, floppy words, and here the speech becomes plain and economical. "Just" and "a little" are words of restraint, and "streak" suggests a quick brushstroke rather than careful coverage. The two colors also balance each other. Red is bold and declarative, while taupe, a muted grey-brown, is subtle and slightly sophisticated. Together they suggest a person who wants to be noticed a little, but on her own terms. The sounds back this up. "Lip," "little," "along," and "lid" repeat their l's, so the last two lines close with a soft, smoothing murmur, and "lip" and "lid" almost rhyme.
There is no regular rhyme scheme or meter anywhere in the poem. It is free verse, with lines of uneven length that follow the rhythm of someone thinking aloud. That informality suits the subject, which is a private decision rather than a public pronouncement.
The title, "OPEN STUDIO POEM #16," gives some context, though only by inference. The number suggests one poem in a series, and "studio" points toward the world of making art. Whether or not the speaker is a painter, the poem's imagery fits that idea: the face becomes a small canvas, with a palette of two colors, a few deliberate strokes, and nothing overworked. On that reading, makeup here is closer to a sketch than to a mask.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it claims. It makes no grand statement about aging or beauty, and the final line ends without a flourish. Yet it quietly changes what makeup means, from correction to choice, from hiding the years to carrying them with a bit of color. The poem's own method matches its message. It uses a few well-placed strokes and trusts them to be enough.