Self-Portrait With & Without
- Self-Portrait With & Without
Dana Alsamsam, poetry
After Chen Chen
With grapefruits & apricots. Without a cat or a dog.With my father who wanted a son. With my mother who wantednothing but closed lips, nothing but nothing. With my father's headshaking slightly. With photographs sealed in boxes in the closet.With traveling to Vienna & Budapest & Istanbul. Without the Internetor MTV. Without sex talks. Without knowing my body as a home.With only my body to learn at night beneath covers. With the other bodieswho learned me before I did. With losing & giving until my skin echoed.With my mother calling me a dyke through perfect white teeth. Withoutmy mother. With the baby teeth & jewelry my mother left behind.With even the humble wedding band left behind. With sisters older& younger flanking me on either side. With my older sister's clenched jaw.With my younger sister's loose shrugs. With my father's growing worriesthat he is not enough for our lives. With my father's life, the sandfalling through quickly. With my mother on a plane to Norway& the new life taking her away. Without a mother. Without a mother.Without my mother. With my father softening like an avocado left outon the countertop. With graveled skin to shield. With the hard & steadfastpit. With mismatched furniture in a too-large house. Without my motherto tell me, to hold me. With Sharon Olds' whisperings white as petals,white as milk. With learning to quell hurt. With the maidenhair fernon my desktop. With my own pictures hung on crappy, rented walls.With O'Keeffe's Rust Red Hills, how that hue was a place to rest. Withmy partner & my kitten. With the dome-shaped togetherness of our sleep.Without perfect memory of that disposable photo taken the day we met.With Sancerre & cigarettes & our Chicago. With the sun setting in slacks.With building this ourselves. With the importance of blood moons & Bolero.With here. With right here. With my mother calling me arrogant & selfishwhile I raise her youngest daughter. With my little sister who doesn't knowthis yet, who has only me to wash her clothing when she sees the shock ofred on white cotton. Without a mother to tell her that women spend theirwhole lives losing, coping with loss, covering loss. With loss that runs in thefamily. With me on my knees. With hands wide-open. With skinthat isn't hardened, grapefruit or apricot skin, any skin other than mine. [End Page 108]
dana alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit, and her poems are published or forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Gigantic Sequins, North American Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Fugue, The Boiler Journal, Salamander, BOOTH, and others. She is a Lambda Literary Fellow in the 2018 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. A Chicago native, she is currently an MFA candidate and a teacher at Emerson College.
