Tag: Self-Portrait

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.

Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror by Kip Knott

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Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror

When you break the mirror this morning
to celebrate turning 60, your ordinary

face shatters into a hundred cutting shards
like a running commentary on who you were,

who you’ve always been, and who you are
at this moment—just a person standing alone

in a pile of broken faces staring up at you
wondering who it is that you’ll become.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

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.

One Poem by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Self-Portrait with Loss of Appetite

 

The crux of it is, who does not want to glide

through space, light—to enter like a dancer,

exit like a gold autumn leaf, float away?

 

Winter hunger always roving in my mind.

Hidden brush strokes, silver on snow falling.

This angel bone haunting, an absence I must find.

 

*

 

Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a GA Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will also be published by Alice Greene & Co. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.