CENTRAL REVIEW • SPRING 2020 • 21
I, TOO
by Emily Colby How do I tell them that I am the entire Pacific Ocean’s worth of waves crashing against the California shore. With me, I move plastic and pike, surfers and sharks am Michelangelo’s right pinky. I carve eyelids and nostrils from muscle memory, I guide the peach-colored brushstrokes of naked skin onto ceilings and walls blessed by God
am an antique. An oaken wood table standing chipped and wobbly and eighty years strong. Memories live in me, I know what it is to have passed through time
How do I tell them that While I am a calf ’s timid, brave first steps, a candle dripping wax onto white linoleum, a steel-string guitar, and a photo of your mother in her youth I am also a daughter of religious parents, an amateur tie-dyer, a week-old vase of roses, a beggar, a wannabe, a scholar, a poet, a dreamer How do I tell them that I, too, am woman?
