Self Portrait in Standard Time
I watch the sun rise on Lake Michigan, midwinter,
return to forgotten geographies long buried. Learn
the word interdigitate. We will never not retell
our old selves: once I had long hair, and once I
almost died. Whitman calls the maker of poems
The Answerer. I am muscular where I have never
been before: what has been softness has become else.
Resound: to sound again. I wonder about a relationship
between intercostal and pentecostal. Pentamerous means
consisting of five parts, but when I hear the word out loud
I think it means having five lovers: I hear amorous.
No recollection where I first saw pentamerous, but
I wrote it down where I would see it again. Recollect:
to collect again. Remember: the opposite of forget, not
of dismember. I have a Pentecostal mother-in-law
who believes I am going to hell (at least, I think so,
I have never asked outright). This makes her sad,
she does not want me to go to hell. She loves me.
She thinks she knows me. Difficult for me to grasp
a love separate from knowing. I work to memorize
that the man I love would not be the man I love
without her. To twine like the fingers of two hands.
ANNIE DIAMOND is a poet and recovering academic who has made her home in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2017. Her writing has also been supported by the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, Sonora Review, No Tokens Journal, and elsewhere.
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