after Phillip B. Williams

Guess who? It is I, peering into the mirror,
ever-expectant of some pleasantly unfamiliar
not-new, not-me me. Why does a third eye
dot my forehead as though I were a screen,
ever-portentous of some unpleasantly familiar
radical dimension, new matter, new me?

Guest etiquette: pink dress with flowers and me
entering it, a wet curtain occludes the mirror—
no flowers? blue flowers? Some other family’s
dinner. Young tongue shy around these unfamiliar
ears, the stomach thick with snake, screening
rooms to find approval in each roving eye—

god, is man’s attention pleasing! God’s weary eye
endures, terrified, tantalizing. Just me
naming myself into adulthood. I scream
dyingly in the key of E, break the mirror
every child’s bursting life makes unfamiliar,
rebreaks, remakes, makes familiar,

gives away. It seems all you ladies are family! 
Each white mouth, white breast, black seeing eye—
no wonder that you seem to me so unfamiliar.
Daughters unlike me, yet, just like me,
engendered. I obsessively liken in the mirror,
reach for stretch and squeeze. The dress is green!

Give me a break. My friend says Let’s screen,
explains: we press palms to our eyes, familiar
naked thought, in the dark a mind makes a mirror—
do you see anything? Bubbling from my I:
erotic razing, un-made body. Please tell me
running face-first into something unfamiliar

gets easier. Because everything is unfamiliar.
Everything wears makeup! That’s my brief screed.
No decree in the pink wake of belief can disprove me.
Don’t I wish the feminine unraveling were a familial
enterprise. So much relative in the mind’s blind eye.
Rapt, The Revolution taps curiously at my mirror—

my mirror is a screen. On the other side of the scream
the most unfamiliar familiar creature rocks gently.
Feral, fêted, blood in their sweet eye. Couldn’t be me.