Michelle Matthees
CYANOTYPE

No one bothered
to tip me
back into my own image.

Now, I’ve got
one eye seeing
forever thru an extra

lens of margin,
the moon’s side inside
of the book’s binding.

A string from my bonnet
pursues fact, bends
into view. I am dusk

opened, compressed ink
off a library pad,
the holes of punched

O’s. Write this
she eloped
No change #2943.

The bluing wind
around my visage
made room for me

Michelle Matthees’ poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Memorious, The Baltimore Review, J Journal, The Prose Poem Project, and Superstition Review. In 2016 New Rivers Press published her collection of poems, Flucht. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA Creative Writing Program. More information about her work is available at michellematthees.com

Image credit: Wang Xi on Unsplash

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #24.