SELF-PORTRAIT AS KALOPROSOPIA

i’ve tried—kneeling at the altar
of blue china and roman busts,
dressing in peacock skirts, shroud
in ginkgo leaves. to act out
ramón casas’s a decadent girl.
to be apollonian. to cut excess,
quit drink, skim fat adverbs. also,
i stood in the dressing room’s
mirrored rows, counted myself
hundreds of times until i specked
with body positivity and the need
for buccal fat extraction. i’ve wanted
for x, but not in this economy.
hid in business casual that’s gender-
bending as dietrich. the utmost
theatricality deserving of an encore.
see y’all tomorrow. i began to use y’all.
i sought for the delicacy of a caravaggio,
how the dark parts strategically lure you
but instead, i was the rough, layered face
of rembrandt, pigmented in greens
and grays, muscle failure, dappled light
on rude pores. art historians use the term
visual diary. a repertoire of pouts, snarls,
and unflinching stares to rebrand
and cameo himself in a biblical setting
like hitchcock winding a clock in rear
window. a recording of nature
from uncertain youth (1629) to white-
feathered artist (1635) to colossally
bankrupt old man wielding a cane
like a scepter (1658). is it an architecture
of costumes or animal honesty? a master
of oil, he signs the canvas just as rembrandt
like michaelangelo had, but i like the van
dyke beard best. i tweeze a generational
chin hair as long as three fates’ thread.
i toyed with handing over dna
to ancestry.com. to learn of apollonia,
josephine, raffaele, or great-grandfather
who gave mussolini the gesto dell'ombrello
and was forced to drink castor oil. to defy
il duce. i drizzle olive oil on day-old bread.
to be storyless. to be unable to live
up to patina. my parents grow older
and i feel myself preemptively unlatch
from gravity—to stay away.

Natalie Louise Tombasco was selected for the Best New Poets anthology 2021 by Kaveh Akbar, Copper Nickel's Editor's Prize, and as a published finalist for Cutbank Books chapbook contest with her manuscript titled COLLECTIVE INVENTIONS (2021). She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Southeast Review. Recent work can be found in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her debut collection has been chosen as a finalist and honorable mention for Persea's Lexi Rudnisky Prize, the Philip Levine Poetry Prize, The Journal's Wheeler Prize, and the Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes.