Self-Portrait as Suicide by Isabelle Doyle

Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul

……Has the weight of a swallow, what less

……Has the weight of a sip?

…………-Joyelle McSweeney, “Tea-Strainer”

I tick, lip-quiver, my head hung low and full of furniture 

ruined by snow, my gut a root wrought in this center, 

my mother a pendulum before every portal. I keep this flicker;

I train this thought to rumble forward and build an arch

above that throughway; I sweat like glass throughout 

this workday; I liquor at twilight like some lecherous fish, 

wits kept at ten fins’ distance, options kept opener

than the wakes of glaciers and burnish this fable

till it has no middle and place my neck on every table

and every morning mirror-linger, wait for my face 

to change its shape. I wait for words to come. I weight. 

Isabelle Doyle is the author of O’Riley, a poetry chapbook published by Jacar Press in November 2021. She is the winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2022 Best of the Net nominee, a semi-finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2018 Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University. Her writing has been published in Typo Magazine, Map Literary, Bending Genres, Jersey Devil Press, The West Review, Ghost Parachute, The Chiron Review, The Madison Review, Susurrus, Bluestem Magazine,  DIALOGIST, The Eunoia Review, The Red Eft Review, The Round, and elsewhere. She is currently a Graduate Council Fellow and Truman Capote Literary Scholar at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

5 December 2022