Tag: self portrait

Self-Portrait in Iron by J. C. Todd

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Self-Portrait in Iron

        after Frida Kahlo, Autoretrato Hierro: La Columna Rota

I paint to pound nails into flesh
into the fetish of high breast and sternum

the fetish of carved and wracked trunk, to display
the central stack of vertebrae, bone link

chinked, shattered and restacked
I paint to nail fear back into wreckage

it thrusts off from, broken and inconsolable
as a temple unroofed and plundered

the earth, dry and cracked, fissuring behind it
this pain I drive into each day

*

J. C. Todd is co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, May 2026). She is author of three poetry collections, most recently the bilingual (English/Lithuanian) What Kept Me Awake/Kas neleido užmigti? and Beyond Repair. Before retiring, she taught in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program at Rosemont College.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE EASTER BUNNY by Amie Whittemore

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SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE EASTER BUNNY

Snug as a denned rabbit, my sweet niece
       asleep in my bed, I woke

to hide eggs in our small apartment.
       Husband dreaming on the futon

in the skimmed light of 5am, I slid eggs
       into shoes, behind picture frames,

under her sweater shed last night
       after we chased each other

round and round the tiny rooms:
       monsters, full of ticklish terror.

She woke and we watched
       her seek treasure—hot, I’d say

sometimes. Cold. She thought it strange
       the eggs were real, not plastic stuffed

with candy or coins. We should hide them
       again when sister gets here—

she knew then, age five, anyone
       can gift someone a mystery.

I haven’t seen her since that Easter
       when I gathered with her family

for the last time before the divorce.
       Somehow, she’s fourteen.

I thought my mythical heart would mend.
       I thought I wouldn’t miss her

now that she’s a stranger. This year, I’ve been
       recruited to hide colored eggs

for my nephew. I feed him hints,
       draw matching whiskers on our cheeks—

both of us animals, feeling brand new.

*

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

One Poem by Peggy Heitmann

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Self Portrait Considering the Mastectomy

       When you delete a wing or limb from a creatures’ form,
       it will inevitably cry out against this taking.
             ~ Lucie Brock-Broido

Who will listen
to the futile wailing against the sawtooth

of pare and scrape and suture. Who will notice
a once gently curved chest, now smooth as a flatiron?

Who will hear the heavy-breath
of resignation, off-balance slosh

of water flooding over the rough stone path
until all that is left are dry sockets,

until all that was severed scabs & scars over
like moss covering a tree root.

*

Peggy Heitmann has published poems in Bethlehem Writer’s Roundtable, Asheville Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. She considers herself both word & visual artist, and a medium. Peggy lives in Raleigh, NC area with her husband and 2 cats.

Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait by Kip Knott

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Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait

        “I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.”
            — Jamie Wyeth

I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969

All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering,
casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim.
Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out
from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves
and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch,
a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw
scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies.
What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?

II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972

Pumpkins grow best atop
the ground rather than below,
unburdened by the weight
of earth and the tangle of roots.
Every autumn we cut them
and gut them and stuff them
with candles until they smile
brightly in spite of their own
defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern
that hides your own face stares
at the world with empty eyes
and a jagged, maniacal smile.
You are the sole sign of life
rising out of this fallow winter
field. Unable to overcome
the cold, your pumpkin head
hangs in a blank canvas sky
like a wan and sallow sun.

*

Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length poetry collection, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.