Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Self-Portrait in Near-White
The purple finch flies off with one gray hair
to build her nest. It's curly and it's long.
Gray glitters, looking better in mid-air
than on my head, where silver equals swan song.
I'm counting on my family history
of snow-white heads, the women rinsed in blue
who made themselves white lions, a her-story
of fierce and feminine. I hope to join that zoo
then leap the fence. My grandmother was white
for forty years, my mother only months.
She realized late it wasn't worth the fight
for blonde when there was illness to confront.
A crone I'll be, but of a certain kind.
The art of white is living out the time.
Bio
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, and Crannóg, among others. She won the Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.