Untitled ("I like to lood in the mirror")

A self-portrait that turns memory, body, cheap interior space, and desert myth into one strange declaration of identity.

A defiant mirror-and-shower self-portrait that opens 'I like to lood in the mirror / and know the movies / have nothin on me,' braids in a desert childhood 'Stealing petrified wood / with my Dad' (and 'a shootgun too'), and turns frankly bodily - lifting her breasts 'to the shower spick,' hair growing 'longer by the instant' - before ending on 'the jade / I have picked up / From the bottom of the Earth.'

The poem's claim is self-sufficiency against glamour: she outshines 'the movies,' and any pretender is dismissed - 'So try they as a look alike.' The childhood memory grounds that confidence in something real and slightly outlaw: stealing 'petrified wood / with my Dad' in the 'mojobi desert,' armed, the family hardy and a little lawless. The shower scene is the poem's center, unabashedly physical - 'I lift my brests to the shower spick,' the cheap fixture and 'plastic stall' insisting this glamour happens in a poor bathroom, not a movie set. 'My moise is not your navel / It is the plastic stall' rejects a partner's romantic geography in favor of the bare material fact of where she actually stands. The closing jade, picked up 'From the bottom of the Earth,' gives her a treasure dug from the deepest, oldest source - real stone against celluloid illusion, the petrified wood of childhood echoed in the jade of now. The deformed verb 'lood' makes looking strange and embodied, and the misspellings ('nothin,' 'mojobi,' 'shootgun,' 'brests,' 'spick,' 'moise') are the source's; I have preserved them. A couple of phrases ('So try they as a look alike,' 'My moise is not your navel') are syntactically unstable, so their exact sense stays partly provisional even though the poem's defiant, embodied self-portrait is clear.