Self-Portrait as Woman Cut Out of a Toulouse-Lautrec Painting
Nicky Beer | Poetry
“At the Moulin Rouge” (1892-5)
My forehead somewhere between absinthe and turquoise.
Stiff-cheeked, Medusa caught in her own glance. Ghastly,
ghastly. I have glimpsed something just over your head,
the shot in the horror film before the mutated bat drops
from the ceiling. My monstrosity similarly without shame.
Never before have pink-shadowed eyebrows been so troubling.
Carnelian lips a sharp, sensuous terror. The Moulin Rouge
is a reef behind me: oystershell profiles, anemoned boas.
Sleeves puffed with hypnotic toxins. Predatory hats.
A miniature shark circles inside a half-filled snifter.
The other faces here at least allow you the privacy of your own gawk.
But the oval floating above my collar disrupts any peace.
Your lungs crush. I’m lost in the hours to come, when my copine
will crack the door, her red dress frenzying the dark.
Trapped and absent in my gaze, no wonder you had to take
out your knife.
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010) both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.