Upon your clothesline I have been stretched for somewhere between hours and minutes. The rope burns my skin, my weight sags from pins.
I can feel wrinkles forming where I'm pinched and pulled, and an out-of-place heaviness rests on my drooping shoulders.
I do not belong here, among your delicates, your laces and silks. I deserve nothing more than to be soaked in the wash bin with graying rags.
Yet you have seen something in me, a rarity of fabric, of color. Something that is deserving of special detergent and air-drying.
And in your presence, the bad thoughts and negativity slowly evaporates, leaving me like drip after drip of tearful water.

Hopelessly blinded by the flash of his camera,
I could pay no attention to your watercolors,
engravings, charcoal sketches, oil pastel portraits.
The stark white background of headshots
was all I could see; no room for florals and foliage.
Preserved by his image, I thought I was permanent.
You let me see that I am pastel and charcoal -
smudged, with colors distorted, but never quite destroyed,
always with original traces in the deepest layers.
He was watercolor - he could be washed away,
with only watery blotches as remnants.
But you are an engraving, on the strongest, most brilliant metal,
with your lustrous being etched into every atom of it.
You leave your mark on my skin, beneath the bruises and scrapes,
beneath the rusted appearance and tarnished memories,
down to the fragile ribs, through the recovering heart,
immortalized for centuries of admiration.

The stranger in the lavatory mirror
puts on a public grin, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.
        -“TALE OF A TUB”, SYLVIA PLATH

But I, incompetent fool of mortality,
have appeared in the mirror as nothing
but stretched skin and pained bones
with diluted features robbed
from ancestors before me. Ah,
the recognition of prior greats; it
strikes me in the soul, knowing
that I will never live to the expectations
held before me, dangled above me
like raw, dripping veal over the unfed
lioness of my heart, plucked away one by one
like grapes being fed to Caesar. Appropriate,
perhaps; the phrase of “Et tu, Brute?”
slips from my disarmed lips far too often.

A world of nothing sacred leaves me
lost in the swirling cyclone of cracked glass,
where fighting only brings deep, jagged
lacerations of mind and body
with struggling glances of withered reflection,
of girl battling demons upon demons
on the brink of crippling surrender.
Bonded to this body of paper and lead,
but filled with notions of ink and poison,
the sight has become an old friend, breaking
through the fogged haze of glorified reality.

Brace me against the past, dear
strength, I ask of you, and allow me
to plunge beyond this frosted pane,
to shatter the veil of uncertainty in a manner
to be immortalized for generations of dust
to see, to believe, to trust more than the
painted smile dancing upon my haunted lips
in the belligerent light of the medicine cabinet’s bulbs.

The photographic chamber of the eye
records bare painted walls, while an electric light
lays the chromium nerves of plumbing raw;
such poverty assaults the ego; caught
naked in the merely actual room,
the stranger in the lavatory mirror
puts on a public grin, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.

Just how guilty are we when the ceiling
reveals no cracks that can be decoded? when washbowl
maintains it has no more holy calling
than physical ablution, and the towel
dryly disclaims that fierce troll faces lurk
in its explicit folds? or when the window,
blind with steam, will not admit the dark
which shrouds our prospects in ambiguous shadow?

Twenty years ago, the familiar tub
bred an ample batch of omens; but now
water faucets spawn no danger; each crab
and octopus -- scrabbling just beyond the view,
waiting for some accidental break
in ritual, to strike -- is definitely gone;
the authentic sea denies them and will pluck
fantastic flesh down to the honest bone.

We take the plunge; under water our limbs
waver, faintly green, shuddering away
from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams
ever blur the intransigent lines which draw
the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact
intrudes even when the revolted eye
is closed; the tub exists behind our back;
its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Yet always the ridiculous **** flanks urge
the fabrication of some cloth to cover
such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large:
each day demands we create our whole world over,
disguising the constant horror in a coat
of many-colored fictions; we mask our past
in the green of Eden, pretend future's shining fruit
can sprout from the navel of this present waste.
In this particular tub, two knees jut up
like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise
on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap
navigates the tidal slosh of seas
breaking on legendary beaches; in faith
we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

Colors of ocean, slate, lichen,
Swirl behind fairy tale dollhouses,
Their shutters closed tightly,
Occupants fretfully dreaming.
Winds like cold-
Hearted demons roar through the trees.

Strong through the torrents,
With nimble branches,
Scalloped-trunk,
An arc of leafed limbs
Shudders with pain that
Causes it to stand *****.

A shadowy moonrise
Sliver by crescent sliver
Casts the street luminescent
And out of the storming clouds
Of Devil's Point
Falls streaked lightning.