Francesca Is Complicit
After Amy Sherlock, “Multiple Expeausures:
Identity and Alterity in the ‘Self-Portraits
of Francesca Woodman,” 2013, an erasure
The nude hovers
between flesh and ideal.
Always an external gaze
complicit. The tactile
apprehension –
sensation of intimacy
thwarted. A mourning.
The withdrawal caught:
every gesture suspended.
The nude crumbling blurs
the doorframe. The threshold
never there.
*
Francesca Is, Francesca Does
After John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, an erasure
A woman is
different. Her attitude
defines what can
be done to her.
Her gestures, voice,
a kind of
aura. To be born
a woman
into the keeping
of men. A self
split must watch
herself:
her image of herself
walking,
weeping. Walking
or weeping.
Everything she is,
she does. Men
survey women.
Women must
contain, interiorize.
Demonstrate
what is and is not
permissible. Women
watch themselves
being looked at:
She turns herself
into an object.
The nude aware
of nakedness
is not as naked.
The mirror
in her hand –
*
Lisa Beech Hartz directs Seven Cities Writers Project which brings writing workshops to underserved communities. She guides poetry workshops for men and women in two city jails. Erasure and ekphrastic poems are among her writers’ favorite ways to create new work. She is the author of The Goldfish Window (Grayson Books, 2018) and These Kismets (CutBank Books, 2025).
