My Mona Lisa by Maureen Kingston

Self Portrait, by Romaine Brooks, 1923.

My Mona Lisa

I know why the grays & greens / the saltpan pallor / the venereal backdrop / your portrait’s a study of the eternal female glaze / the pewter putty we women apply to conceal our hot hurt-blush / our coralline scars
 
lapidé / your word for yourself / your autonym / a child bride of stoning / like Jane Eyre though more chic & more pissed at the maman who starved you & kicked you to the curb / worse off than any orphan when a mother lives but doesn’t want you
 
chère Romaine / your portrait’s a landscape of all women ever abandoned by their mothers / & though you cloak your sorrow in male drag / no corporeal man could ever rescue you from this mother of all primal wounds
 
the trauma of it mildews your complexion / drains the red from your lips / & no matter where we stand in the gallery your spectral face demands we stop & bear witness to the death of mythic tendresse

Maureen Kingston

Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, riverbabble, So to Speak, and Stoneboat. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.