Portrait of Myself as Watson, my Great Grandmother, Sherlock Holmes by Michelle Bitting

Because the men keep going missing and we like to wear the pants. We look
good in tweed and love a long smoke sorting things out before a dark fire.
She’s been dead seven decades but her ghost sense burns better than green
oils I like to sample at the medical store on Lincoln. We ride in my car and
when the upholstery sweats patchouli I know I’m time traveling for real. A
particular aroma swooping me back to 1981 Sundays and stumbling down
Telegraph, bleary from the evening’s indulgences, in need of aspirin and
eggs. Being a doctor, I’m licensed to mix it up and sometimes Holmes and I
switch hats—my bowler for his deerstalker. We both know I’m the one
addictively inclined. At the end of each case I say Bring me the needle,
Watson and he follows my clue to swap parts, unbuckles our bag of
flowered ampules, the smashed and simmered petals that will take me far,
far away. Hey, I dreamed us here in the first place, dressed up and armed us
to unfasten latches, my black box opened in hot pursuit of fiends, a legacy
of crimes and love that keeps crashing historical pages, our collective field
of casualties. Enough souls lost to want to trace why all’s not right or quiet
on my western front.

Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of Arizona Global.

18 July 2022