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You are here: Home / Poetry / Self-Portrait with Window & Balloons
Self-Portrait with Window & Balloons

Poetry

Self-Portrait with Window & Balloons

I’m music stand and mud, 
littered with the plastic lips
of a late-night celebration.
 
I’m walking down a bowling alley,
ready to strike, gently.
 
I’ve stopped at a gas station
to fill the well with helium,
squeaking, Please
don’t let anyone I love
die before their time.
 
A guy on a bike with a boombox
rides by, arms out like a kite.
 
Confetti stains the shelves
where toilet paper used to be.
 
I check my phone again,
in the middle of foraging 
for bubble wrap.
 
What’s happening in India?
What are all my friends thinking
about right now? 
 
Did you know, fungi are the eye of life,
slurping up oil spills
and burping out bug habitats?
 
I’m learning how to grow
food from the actual ground,
swelling into the next dimension
like a paper lantern freed
from festivities, box of seeds 
tucked under my pits, a little bit stinky.
  
I needed solitary refinement.
I needed to ravage the mouthy dirt
of Mother Earth with my fingers 
to remember which veggies 
grow in the fall. Now I’m bursting 
into bubblegum, ready to be chewed 
and chewed until—
 
Zucchini. Beets. Beans.
Carrots. Crookneck squash.
Potatoes. Pumpkins.
 
Pop! A pink slinky blinks
down concrete stairs.
 
5—I prefer to do my business
in the woods, taking calls 
from the glass house 
of my mind. 
 
4—I’m jumping out 
of a senator’s skirt,
basket of hot air
landing in a bed of moss.
 
3—I take child’s pose on the bluff,
worshipping the opalescent glow
of my own magnetic field.
 
2—It’s time to play the fool again.
I steal a glance at myself
in a barbershop window—
 
1—The mask slips down my nose,
and suddenly, balloons!
 
Balloons, balloons, balloons
everywhere! Balloons pouring out
of windows, nostrils, elevators!
Balloons stuffed into shirtsleeves.
Balloons on the wrists of lizards.
Balloons being licked by monkeys.
Balloons bobbing in chocolate fondu.
Balloons barging out the chimney flue.
Balloons stuck to stripper heels.
Balloons drifting down middle school hallways.
Balloons with the happiest sad faces.
Balloons floating up the well.
Balloons yipping and yapping
about an apocalypse
PARTY, like it’s time
to rewild this city.

Nancy Lynée Woo is a 2022 Artists at Work fellow in poetry. She has received fellowships from PEN America, the Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her work has been published in The Shore, Tupelo Quarterly, Stirring, Radar Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Nancy has an MFA in creative writing, poetry, from Antioch University and a BA in sociology/environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz. Her work is largely inspired by the magic and power of the natural world. Find her cavorting around Long Beach on Tongva land in California, and online at nancylyneewoo.com or @fancifulnance on social.

Featured Artwork:

Flight

Nazrene Alsiro is an Artist located in Atlanta, GA. Her interdisciplinary work is rooted in her studies of Photography, Video and Sculpture at Florida State University. Much of her work is drawn to the gaps between mental health and societal normalcy. Personal in nature, her work is also reflective of both her mixed-race, as well as, her Palestinian-American identity, addressing the turmoil in the West Bank.

Her studies in sculpture inform both her use of double exposure photography to build narratives from emotions and moments, as well as her canvases of acrylic built up with layers of paint dipped paper. Nazrene continues her search for the unidentifiable through exploration, observation, and experience.

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