How a Mirror is Made
1.
I can’t remember the first time I saw myself
in the mirror, but a photo shows ballet class,
age three, a blur of a girl with bangs over
her eyes and fleshy thighs, no shoes, no tights.
Three rows of penguins in coats of red sequins
spread their fingers in sequence,
and the girl forgot when to clap,
when to roll over,
when to sit, good girl!
On stage, when
twirled
the wrong way
without a wall as a guide, when to be without practice,
without practice,
what knew was girl to girl, watching,
copying
who , the right places.
2.
A mirror is the face that doesn’t lie,
an echo
that gives us
to us.
It shows what is there
(we are there),
that tugs into.
3.
Before they
was I,
grounded,
the stage crossed
with black tape,
following the map
from the floor.
4.
A reflection:
to recognize,
the dance
so close, but not exactly —
those girls called me, called I
a girl who a girl a girl who saw
from the audience
take your seat
spread
across the stump
of your knee
(wherever I was supposed
to go)
5.
Anchored
to a turn-style,
the mirror:
so that we are seen,
so that we know.
The picture of ourselves
that we carry,
who walks around
when we forget,
so worn, so clear.
Jeanette Beebe is a poet and journalist based in New Jersey. Her poetry has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Delaware Poetry Review, Nat Brut, Rogue Agent, and Tinderbox Poetry. Her poem “Adopted” won First Prize in the Iowa Poetry Association’s Lyrical Iowa Competition. Previously, she founded and directed Moving ForWords Productions, an arts collective, to support her hometown poetry slam in Des Moines, Iowa. Her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, “An Instrument for Blinking (Poems)”, was advised by Tracy K. Smith. www.jeanettebeebe.com.
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