poem
- elichvar
- Apr 11
- 1 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
by Kenton K. Yee
Self-Portrait in the Rear View Mirror
Escher would recognize the squalmous
structures around the eyes that look like leaves
morphing into hands with fingers and opposable
thumbs, each etching a forehead and barrister’s
wig, but I’m just drawing what I see—lips, em-
dash compunctions, spindles of sporing blooms,
blushes, and blots—in this chaotic subatomic
quantum cosmic facial this and that. Sometimes,
I’m unraveling strands of double helix between
my digits stained from wiping sweat and fabric
dust from around my mother’s eyes. Now, I find
myself whispering a ladybug off of a Neruda ode
about a bug-eyed moth flapping into a flow of
sticky ink seeping across an off-white canvas
awaiting fingers and thumbs to draw a pencil
etching me, twelve, pretending to read Neruda
but imagining Escher drawing me drawing
Einstein, eyes down, writing.
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Cincinnati Review, I-70 Review, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Plume Poetry, Grain Magazine, and Rattle, among others. A PhD in theoretical physics, Kenton taught at Columbia University. He writes from Northern California.