Autobiography 

Don’t be married to autobiography.

-Phil Brady 

I am not married to Autobiography, but we are lovers. This is my first lesbian relationship. I’ve been trying to awaken my inner lesbian for years, but until now all I could muster was an artistic lust for the female figure. Autobiography is different, although she embarrasses me, won’t let me tell the story the way I want to. She reminds me about the wine stain on the satin chair, the forgotten Mother’s Day cards, my fear of glass elevators. She makes fun of me, the gray tooth and the way one eye squeezes shut when I laugh. She says beauty is symmetrical. I am obsessed with Autobiography, call her late at night and leave message after message. I just want to hear her voice. I think she is two-timing me. I am afraid she will run off with the other woman. We fight. We make up. We go to our café, bookstore. Later, I will write about it all. When Autobiography and I walk by people we know, they begin to tremble.

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The Sculptor’s Hands

knuckle raw from tin snips

finger the paint brush,

insulin syringe

for the old cat,

plant skeleton towers

for vines – moon flowers

bloom outside his door.

The hands feel the heft

and play of clay scraps

glazed into planets –

color haze spinning lazy

in their metal cradle.

With a friend

they engage a thumb war.

Moist inside the welding

gloves, the clay slurry.

A tiny squirrel blown

to the ground surrounded

by the sculptor’s hand

will not take a meal

from the dropper. The hands

feel the small breath –

and shards of glass and metal,

the mounds and crooks

of the woman, pads

of the keyboard and trombone,

strawberries in season.

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 Lean

At the James Turrell sculpture

she leaned against a wall

of light, fell, broke

the bone she stands on,

sued for damages but missed

the point – I, too, forget to see

myself seeing, reach for the switch

when the sky light

pours down. If we could

see like birds, we would know

water as it mirrors up, the cactus

with its arms to stand on –

or like amoebas in their green glass

world, who float without up and down,

swirl away in the wake

of giant fish you and I

could hold in our hands.

I see in a mountain a door,

a face, two breasts, I see myself

dying soon, or leaning against

you, a wall of light.

 

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Karen Schubert

My chapbook The Geography of Lost Houses (2008) was published by Pudding House, and my poems have appeared in various journals, most recently Ariel, The Broome Review, Sin Fronteras: Writers Without Borders, Red Clay Review, and Storyscape. I was nominated for Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize. I am a student in the NEOMFA through Cleveland State, and editor of Whiskey Island Magazine.

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