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  • 25 Lines or Fewer

Paper-Quilled Self-Portrait

By Tea Gerbeza

I dip my paper strip in colours of scoliosis, white
my spine, mounted snow-covered

heart fields in the midground against rolling lung hills
the foreground, a gold crouching

sinew what I thought to be a ruin of stretched canvas
all whirls of grey, I carry away

from the mirror quilled shapes, build: a sunset
background in forty-five-degree

looped strips of bruised translucent flesh speckled brown
moles, a plush pink curved scar road

canary yellow and orioles’ orange cover
bone, flesh as loud as morning bird song

I put down the slotted tool
dip my fingers in

white silhouette

Tea Gerbeza, "Paper-Quilled Self-Portrait" from Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits: An International Anthology of Poetry and Photography edited by Antony Di Nardo and Wency Rosales. Copyright © 2022 by Tea Gerbeza. Reprinted by permission of Tea Gerbeza.

Poet Bio

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent poet and multimedia artist. Her scanograph My Father Catches Me Confronting Memory won an honorable mention in Room magazine’s 2020 Cover Art Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2021 Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize. Gerbeza is a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow. She resides on a Canadian prairie with her spouse and three corgis.

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