Jennifer Met
Stranger on a Nude Beach
—On Woman Combing Her Hair (Alexander Archipenko 1915)
Breaking, water on skin
bells to the wind—fresh water
pearls breaking, clattering
to the floor. Now gloss bronze,
wet sand sticking, she breezes
comb from tote. Tosses it across,
knock-kneed. But here her arm frosts
over, in love with a single, brunet
need—best these sea-wet curls.
Airhead! A full moon’s beacon
bubbling—the beach we seek
in abysmal night’s swell. Forever
vain! Me rising to jaw, borrow comb,
breech her arm’s confines—but her brain
empty. One to talk. Moon as double
exposure. Mirror missing, you comb
in front of me instead. Do we address
our breasts unbound, face the why
of our legs shut tight? Ah, Cubism, we
sound in tandem, not ceaselessly
standing to self-stare as sculptor
might have us, but so airy, so carefree
quick your gaze has already turned,
left before the long exposure
completed. Breaking free, sovereign
arm raised to a vacuum, pulling
my open gape, but break too this
flesh-faced fantasy—just that—
already gone. And now void, I am
left reaching—caught peeping—head
left forever circling the invisible
thought—its moon—its feminine
Tabula Rasa
Start from the beginning—not clay, as they teach,
but marble—mineral recrystallized in an interlocking
mosaic. Call it a miracle. Call it family. Call it to you
like a lap dog—the Earth as recycled art. Now do
like your mother. It would have been easier to work
in the positive—adding mud to form feather—shape
created around nothing. Easier to pack & pressure
geological rings as you go—linear as time. Laboring
in the reverse is a more difficult birth. But chisel this
hidden bust that already exists—smooth, white & nipple-
less. This is your classical. Form by punishment—
take away what is already there. In this way the creation
myth is not tortured, but in mistake you cannot go back
to add more stone. Instead, the Earth becomes smaller &
smaller—a mere mote in the block of available space.
Smaller still—until today seems almost forgivable—just
an insignificant speck in the timeline of the universe.
My whole world, she shrinks as I try to reconstruct her—
whittling, whittling too far & finally losing the project
with a careless exhale above the work table. But know
this is mother Earth’s gift to motherhood. Together we
are a Shinto God of Destruction—giving our daughters
the opportunity our original creator did not—a stone heart—
a clean slate. Spring’s rebirth—to add—to build largely
in the positive.
Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published in Gone Lawn, Harpur Palate, Juked, Midway Journal, The Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Sleet Magazine, and Zone 3, among other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).
