POUR, TEAR, CARVE

And She Was Born

By Sue Eisenfeld

—after Janet Taylor Pickett’s And She Was Born, 2017

She grew out of nothing, blankness, 
Emerging from the negative space.
Look at her now: defiant,
Arms akimbo atop her strong, healthy form.
She has un-erased her erasure, 
Painted herself back onto the canvas, black,
Glowing against the night of her North Star.

She frames herself by the re-frame 
Of cultivating her own forest, fruit, and field, 
Seedpods unfurling the dreams of her ancestors,
Snipped and scrapbooked by survival, saved
Over the long ocean of time.
She paints her face the warrior she is.

I’d like to borrow her red fruits and green fields,
Take scissors to the squiggle of a yellow seed,
Copy the blaze of her fiery eye,
Trace the double diamonds under her arms,
Stitch, impasto, and glue them into my sketchbook,
Arrange them over the ashes I salvaged from Before times,
Charcoaled over the blank page:
Re-birthing myself by collage.

Sue Eisenfeld’s poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Poets Writing the News. She is an essayist whose work has been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays and published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Forward, Gettysburg Review, Potomac Review, and more. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction and teaches in the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Science Writing program.