Self Portrait in the Backyard as Mother
Tulip-bellied, fists full of weeds, the baby shuffles over the wet grass,
the baby stumbles like a drunk
toward me, the baby wants to roll on top of me,
climb back inside my body but what about
the times I want her gone, want my body to myself,
want only to believe in my own useless wanting?
Self-Portrait Composed of Lines from Marina Tsvetaeva’s Notebook Entry 1940
To the dacha, meeting with S who is sick.
Gradually pain in my heart.
I live without documents
My loneliness. Dishwasher and tears.
The overtone—the overtone of everything—is terror.
A hundred times a day to the cellar.
When can I write/?
I am afraid of everything. Eyes. darkness, footsteps. and most of all—of myself…
For a year I have been trying on death.
(from The Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva. Irma Kudrova)
Self-Portrait as Playroom Toy Box
Star face of a pinwheel snapped off.
Shrinky Dinks melting into moon bowls in the oven.
Marbles jumbled in a box like baby teeth—the ache of it, a mouth filled with glass?
I’m not talking about dolls or a doll face or a head taken from a body.
Or the outgrown. Or the never-grown. Or the never.
The ache of it?
The pinwheel’s five points. The bowl made of skin.
Sew me up. Shut me up. Stitch me together with loose, looped yarn
so I can hold them tight.
