Self-portrait between the Hairbrush and the Weighted Blanket
After Heather Sellers and Edvard Munch
At the beginning—
the great onslaught
of the ordinary day
—I crawl out,
exit this tight iris bud,
ease the misaligned spine,
risk ache of hollow bone
on hard floor.
Behind me there’s a naked blue
woman on the wall.
What is a woman—
breast, curve, camelia lip,
head full of blooming hair?
Mother, daughter, sister, wife,
we rise to reorder
the ashen day,
to recreate inevitable
faces of decline.
with color and light.
Last Night
After Gerald Stern‘s “Waving Goodbye”
I wanted to know what it was like
before we knew distance,
before grief and geography
came between us,
before we created gulfs
we could not cross.
So I got on a plane and flew
through three climate zones
into the warm kitchen
of my mother’s winter,
and, hungry from the airport,
divvied up the one baked apple
and two forgotten sweet potatoes
while she stood in the doorway afraid,
unsure which direction to turn
her unfamiliar walker. I navigated us
to the TV room, pressed the complicated
sequence of buttons for PBS news,
picked shards of shattered wine glasses
from the braided rug.
Later, I help her make the bed
just before sunset,
before we climb in together,
bodies bent and brittle and
outside it is snowing.
Janna Schledorn’s poetry is featured in anthologies Phenomenal Women (Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation 2023), Mother Mary Comes to Me (Madville 2020), and journals, including Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Amethyst Review, and SWWIM, as well as her chapbook, Those Nine Days (2021). She lives in Melbourne, Florida and teaches composition and creative writing at Eastern Florida State College.
The Marbled Sigh 