Self-Portrait as Rotting Lemons
Thick-skins shine jaundiced
in the chipped ceramic bowl
where I arranged them: spotlit
and spoiling now in the window
because I believed in happiness
as a Pinterest board, cleanliness
a badge that meant worthiness,
the opposite of poor. I coveted
a basic life: loungewear, roomba,
a symmetry worth noting, linen
duvet with matching sheets, gold
vibrator so discrete you’d wear it
on your neck. A life you’d want
to buy on Goop.com, bright
white, citrus-infused-water
in-a-fluted-glass-carafe-life
that isn’t mine. In my life, I reach
for a lemon, blooming blue,
my hand breaking the waxy mask,
a delicate sensation all its own.
Metamorphosis
I didn’t want to believe in nature or nurture. To be the girl
whose picture I keep in a book next to my bed. To die
at thirty-two with a gun clasped in my hand. My mothers,
my two fragile wings: the one who carried me, the other
who cared for me. Both of them a weight I bear, folding
and unfolding their pull against my back. I know
not all creatures can endure the burden of change, the way
the caterpillar dissolves completely during metamorphosis—
tissue thick and sticky, cells coding re-creation. But the body
and its double is already predetermined inside the egg,
long before the creature is even born. An open question:
if at a fancy restaurant, my father-in-law turns to me
and says “I guess you’re really white trash, then,”
does it mean it’s true? Once, after a terrible storm,
I found several chrysalises in the garden, bright green pods
nestled in the sharp slate of the garden path. The home
I made for them: a large dinner plate. I delighted in the bounty
of small gems, until the silhouettes of half-formed wings
shrunk and blackened against the cloudy edge. What I’d wanted
was an ending that wasn’t so inevitable. Instead, I learned
to camouflage myself. To make the face of some fiercer animal.
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