Portraiture
He wanted
an audience to watch
while he makes the portrait
while he talks about how
he chose me, makes me
pose for him, for you
He says it takes all this
humiliation
to let the real me be seen
In posing, I give
up almost everything
to become who
he wants
who he says I am
It’s hard to figure out
with all your eyes
on me, and him going on
about illumination and
submission and negative space
You can say this
is about beauty
but it’s about spit
maybe his, maybe mine
I get so confused in the gaze
every eye’s an opening
looking to be filled
He wanted
to make my portrait
I am changing
in his image I
will never change
I tell him
pick up your brushes
and touch me
Jory Mickelson (they/them) is the author of three books of poetry Picturing (End of the Line Press, 2025), All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2024) and Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press, 2019), winner of the High Plains Book Award in Poetry. They have received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Dear Butte, the Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and most recently the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. They live and write amid the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest.
Currently Reading:
Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions, 2009)
Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki, translated by Karen Van Dyck (NYRB, 1995)
Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare (Nightboat Books, 2023)
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (Penguin Books, 2013)
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