When I take out the picture of my mother

Abstract

when I take out the picture of my mother LM Brimmer (bio) [ See PDF for formatting of the poem. ] with her mother and my sister I remember howexile is a legal amendment that can also be felt. i was omitted. ellipses an ekphrasis of my inherited custom frame. in a mirror I remain concealed. old film too afraidto be revealed. here every pixel is flesh-elision the wrinkles i have, She has, too. my/Her mother's chin… & now I'm yellowing on Kodak, refused a flash-marked birth. undeveloped, afloat in my mind, unused exposures expire before i've been made. the new sacrament. where gloves & jackets squint back at the lens from the house front. unseasonable hurriedly aimed, handled thing discover me blindfolded. kept. weapons fire in-between faces & out of frame. it's me, hardwood softened by proximity to the sea. am i her memory? One yearning to be adapted. O, teach me how to return from the tide where every picture is a tightly closed eye! the next thing i know the nurse has tied my arms & i'm alone in an awful naked room, island of punishment, birth hovers the rupture along my windswept coast. my clouded elegy. had escaped that palace, the tunnel, & had skipped the boat – [End Page 167] yowl for my restoration with the skill of a marineanimal— sea my opaque corneal current. look, eye have become the zookeeper & the zoo. [End Page 168] LM Brimmer LM Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MHS Press, 2019), their writing has appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, and Quarterly West. In 2021, their work made semi-finalist for Newfound Journal's Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was long listed for Frontier Poetry's Award for New Poets. They attend the MFA program at Randolph College as a Blackburn Fellow. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press