Self-Portrait Poem That Is Also a Study

By Fabienne Josaphat

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I see myself in her in photos, and see her in myself. Lately it seems I see her everywhere. Sometimes she is the woman pushing her shopping cart down the aisles hunting for canned olives and mackerel to fill her pantry, shopping with her eyes first, and then weighing and smelling candles, the ultimate luxury in this American life, one a nurse’s aide cannot afford. I recognize her in the way she slumps over the frame of the cart for support, unable to carry the weight of her own body, heels clapping in clogs with each step, applauding her survival. My mother endured too much and that is the miracle and this is what I tell myself too when I look in the mirror, for this is where I find her the most: in the double chin of motherhood, creased with fear of my own failure, in the wrinkles on my forehead that I massage with anti-time creme, in the way I push the cart down the aisle and lean in for support, barely holding up my own body under the weight of this country, what it has done to me, her, us—in the way I emotionally down an entire bar of chocolate as I sit in the car, swallowing shame, in the gray hairs I now count in each brittle braid. I too am falling. I too am failing. I too am afraid.

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Fabienne Josaphat is the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and the author of the forthcoming novel Kingdom of No Tomorrow (Algonquin). Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, was published by Unnamed Press. Her publications include poems in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Grist Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, and Eight Miami Poets, and essays in The Washington Post and Teen Vogue. She is currently at work on a third novel.

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