POETRY

Self-Portrait as Pathetic Fallacy

By Tina Schumann     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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Like a dress without a song I eucalyptused my longings
into a consolation of trees and hit the highway
in search of my kingdom come, my promised land,
my shining city on the hill. A million tiny miracles pinged
out a rhythm on the windshield while the DJ annulled all
worldly affirmations. Abandoned factories vibrated
in blissful deliverance, chain-link fences blew kisses
through toothless grins and a little soft shoe. Oh, California freeway . . .
Oh, freedom off-ramp and volunteer lupines . . . look away, look away.
I was not lonely as a cloud—
but close—close as dandelions
nodding their heads above their roots, proudly
dancing the cancan across the lawns of America.
Every yes became a paper bag negation floating
on its own emptiness, every stone was willingly turning—
everything . . . everything was so . . .
self-possessed—like the flagrant face
of an errant hubcap sprinting toward the tree line—
or the exquisite sadness of the linemen and flaggers,
the yellow hems of their vests rising and falling
against the laughing mirage of asphalt where serene barricades
high-fived the horizon and the lost weed of myself swayed
evergreen on the terraced hillsides of happiness.


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TINA SCHUMANN is the award-winning author of four poetry collections, most recently Boneyard Heresies, winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Poetry Award (Missouri State University), forthcoming December 2024; Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press); Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues, winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition; and As If (Parlor City Press), winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is the editor of the IPPY award-winning anthology Two-Countries: US Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press) and poetry editor for Wandering Aengus Press. Her poems have appeared in journals widely since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Catamaran, Cimarron, Hunger Mountain, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Verse Daily, and NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.


VOLUME 57 No. 4