Self-Portrait as Self-Care Mantra

Head tilted back, eyes to the light, I squeeze single tears of moisturizer from the glass jar: forehead, cheek, cheek, a cross, martyr mystic blessing that promises to unblemish me.

//

After the hospital everyone brought facemask sheets. In meager bursts of human feeling I’d unpeel the wet paper cut into alien likenesses of a panda bear or cat. I’m not through them yet, gestures of wellness, I am working at them like a rosary, residue oily and chemical so I disobey the package’s advice and rinse my face. Yes okay I am refreshed, I am good, I am doing good.

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I wish I had a tender nickname for myself. “Don’t believe it Lizzy” and “Lizzy you are perfect.” Anyone who used a nickname on me is long gone. I call myself worse things and I am still the company I keep, alive and unhappy. It’s not the being alive that makes me sad but the living part, my nerves so cliché and hysterical.

I fail to protest, compost, to write edgy poems about genitals, fail to scribe care onto my body, translate myself to myself, to stop lying, to know the lie, to build a marvelous cavernous boat and push its belly out to sea, to swallow anything, to sing.

//

In my mother’s bathtub I drink her syrupy $5 wine, squeeze pink goo from its envelope and smear the mask like sticky melted jellyfish debris on my face, wait, something to peel away in 20 minutes.
Wine drips and disappears into the steamy water. My face tightens, is tightened around. All of it will come away beneath my nails.