Autobiography
art by Beth Kephart
by Maggie Greaves
“One of the things that was funny about being in America was that so little of my past came up.”
––Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography
I fell out of my mother with the cord around my neck.
My childhood disasters were vague and intimate.
I snuggled them in the dark.
By my thirties,
I’m able to slice vegetables precisely while the children tug at my feet and scream.
This is something I’ve only seen mothers do in other countries.
Sometimes, said my therapist,
When we’re talking, you go very far away.
Where else would I go?
I’m tired of myself:
The authentic self in a notebook,
The bounded Western subject at the museum,
The performance of a self,
The shell of a self,
The American self in the bright green grass.
I’ll die wishing
I had spent my life experiencing selfhood not as narrative but as simile.
The self is like a world, but less round.
The self is like the antithesis of a mother.
The self is like a poem,
Except in the clunky ways it isn’t.
Do in some countries our shadows fall off?
I found this question from my daughter in an old notebook.
We had been walking in her father’s village,
Practicing the language.
It was hot, and our shadows were dark on the road.
That was the most plainly I ever saw myself.
We must have been holding hands.
Maggie Greaves's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such magazines as The Missouri Review (as Poem of the Week), Seneca Review, Third Coast, Literary Matters, Spoon River Poetry Review, and North American Review. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the scholarly book Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2023). Currently, she is associate professor of English at Skidmore College.
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some 40 books in multiple genres. Her art appears or will soon appear in a range of journals and magazines including Women Who Create, Print (online), Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, Calyx, The Core, and Lunch Ticket. She is the creator of the bestselling words + image Substack, The Hush and the Howl. More at bethkephartbooks.com.
