Mirror Images

The first man who called me unfeminine
taught Swift, read aloud about the
Brobdingnagian women and their dugs.
"Where's your mirror?"  he asked,
and when I had none called me
unwomanly.  All women carry mirrors.

I have mirrors: boxes of them in the bottom
of my closet; tiny mirrors; mirrors to keep;
mirrors to give away; mirrors my mother gave me
to carry with me so I might always be feminine.

My sentences are my looking glass;
my mirrors are my sentence.
They are prisons defining the length of my sentence;
yet in my silences and in yours what confinement.

In these lines I find reflections of myself.
The mirror fogs when you breathe on me.

When you look over my shoulder,
the image in my mirror changes.

If I place the mirror just so between us,
we can see one another, but not ourselves.
It depends on the angle of incidence.

If you stand directly in front of my mirror,
look into it closely, you can see your reflection
by looking through me.

The woman my husband loves
has a voice so soft I cannot hear it.
Yet she is free with my mirrors.
He says she cries out in her sleep.

Only a Lady Poet

would write about
asparagus,
thumb-thick, thrusting
almost visibly up
through yielding earth.

Reader, you have
a dirty mind.
I simply meant
a growing crop,
each stalk rising
from a tangle of roots.

Or bunched,
bundled bound
by a rubber band,
trimmed and loosed
into a pan, simmering.

Most are erect,
but others condescend,
incline their heads
towards others as at any
cocktail party.

No gentleman poet
would write about
asparagus; gentlemen
poets grow visibly
famous writing
about, say, plums.

       

Miriam N. Kotzin has been a contributing editor for Boulevard since its first issue.  In addition to Boulevard, her work has also appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Mid-American Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Drexel Online Journal, Confrontation, Pulpsmith, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum among others.  Poetry is forthcoming in The Vocabula Review.

She teaches creative writing and literature at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.

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