Airea D. Matthews

SELF-PORTRAIT AS FLOOD

If done properly, the head surrenders
then the body. The human instinct

is panic but, for masters of current,
buoyancy prevails against tempests. 

How often I am misunderstood—
not devastation, but answer.

Every rain dance amounts to me,
every drought readies for my ruin. 

And yet, only part of me ever fully gives
way, held back by some reluctant grace.

Still, I drift—hundreds of night-soot
miles west of wherever I was, toward

distant shores, quiet cradle’s innate
desire to deafen what I’ve loosed— 

whether cypress ribs splayed or bloom
undone, bare but sublime in retreat.

As I said, rest the head; the body
follows. This gift I have given is how

to survive me. An invitation to notice
the weightless stars, hear your wild pulse

beneath a tide that pulls and unmoors
the moon’s migratory gestalt shift

where all once possessed becomes
elegy, and nothing before compares

to that lotus’s nape draping
hopeful over my pretty mess.

AIREA D. MATTHEWS is a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she co-directs the creative writing program. A Guggenheim fellow and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate, she is the author of two books of poems: Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2024), winner of the 2024 LA Times Book Prize.