Poem by Lynne Thompson

Self-Portrait as Last Year                    
 
when I was unarticulated as mountains or months,
when there were electronic take-overs instead of
                      I loved, once.
 
I am delayed—as in the end of worlds,
the end being the beginning 
of fissure, my body increasingly indistinct.
 
Speaking of the body,
what I said of it also goes for religion,
its rituals an insistent inconstant.
 
                      Ditto yellow, blue,
the bitter of Brussels sprouts and
the sizzle of hot jazz, growing ever more faint.
 
But be sure:  the sure, the usual suspects (family, 
other enemies, political ministers, the seeping orb)
can look me up in the funny papers.
 
Because you can’t forget me,
write this down:
 
                      echo—snowmelt—suchness.

Winner of  2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize, the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2016, and a Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles for 2015-16, poet Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, African American Review, Crab Creek Review, and, Poetry, among others. 

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