Self-Portrait in Small-Town Summer
In this body I wake up in a house with everyone I love
gone. With the crippled lightbulbs & gypsy moths
that defoliate the trees outside. They are reckless but
leave nothing. No imprint of a corpse. In this
new town I find history engraved on yard signs,
discover fossils disguised as fences: warning, do not
enter. July moves in next door but the house remains
empty & maybe they live alone too. Sunlight only
reflected across the windows, glassy-eyed. Once,
I saw a woman dressed in moss. She caught me
staring & she hid the moon behind the television set
as a reminder that today will never end. The next
day she boarded up the front door and draped curtains
around the windows & called it a dollhouse, dust
bunnies & plastic children occasionally falling asleep
on the front lawn. The world spins on the axis of
heritage & I trace over their figures in broad daylight.
They are only the inhabitants of stories passed on
by word of mouth & they turn into monograms
in grayscale. They fade away from the family portrait
that hangs in the foyer & the sun drains the color
from their faces, now bleached in nothing. There is
something beautiful about the faces I don’t recognize,
bodies floating in a summer’s dreams, weightless.
Jessica Kim
Jessica Kim is a writer based in California with works appearing or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Semicolon Lit, and more. Her poems have recently been recognized by the National Poetry Quarterly and Pulitzer Center. She loves all things historical and sour.