Domestic Interior

Self-Portrait at the End of the First Half of My Life

Self-Portrait at the End of the First Half of My Life What can you do?You get these MaeWest hips and Jayne Mansfield breasts to succor with And everyone thinks you’re gonna be motherly: Friends, boyfriends, cats, addicts, dolls. But I had no “issues”; I knew I’d issue kids. This was something that just is. [The condescension one can give to the barren and all of that nasty shit The “sainted mother” (a soul-killer) that comes with my genetic history. None of that!—and that, I guess, is motherly.] But I wanted to be more like the color of steel, like the kind made at my grandfather’s company, Hard, smooth, and cool like the flat and hipless; And so it is that I wanted to be a “some like it cold” type— As I once read that Ring Lardner said or wrote In Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride of long ago. [And somehow the world has forgotten “momism” of several generations back; See, e.g., the generation of Ring Lardner; And they’ve resurfaced— Career moms, heart attacks.] I wish I’d known that I could have been instead like a superheroine Big boobs and thighs and boots all busted up and fighting crime Holding aloft a sword and looking for a fight, But curvy and stacked, all right. I wish I’d known— I could have seen my cartoon-like-inflations like that And I would have stood up straighter And I wish I had known that I could have been seen like a woman painted by Roy Lichtenstein Fake and wonderful and titty and comic-strip lips. Ah, regrets! 49 ...