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.