I can't see you with women

how could I expect you to see me

when I couldn’t even see myself?

this isn’t a poem about you, it’s

a poem about me and

my relationship to self.

virginia woolf called it when she said once one has a room of their own,

you open back up unto yourself.

this is not to say it’s all about rooms and

others do not play a large role in my formation of self.

my identity is formed, performed, informed and reformed alongside those close to me —

the queers, the femmes, the sexually expressive.

yet if I make a painting of so many of you,

it actually turns out to be

about none of you at all,

but rather a picture of me;

refracted in the limbs of countless bodies

and formed in the crevices

where each joint connects;

my reflection flickering

like Laura’s image in Petrarch’s pond.

I paint in order to know,

I write in order to interpret.