About the Author:

Brandi Homan is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books. She has been published in or has poems forthcoming from Eleventh Muse, Salt Hill, CutBank, Fugue, North American Review, and Natural Bridge, among others. She earned her MA in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is working on her MFA in poetry at Columbia College. She recently completed her first full-length collection, Hard Reds.

from the book:

Self-Portrait in Blueshift

As if I have cyanosis,
indigo in my creeks and pockets,

I’m throttled with futility,
the black-throated blues.

I walk the bottom of a pool,
an aquarelle I saw

in a calendar once, ataxic,
cumbrous. Legs of rill

and tendon. Everything
transient and malleable,

ultramarine. Hips piscine, half-
open. Mouth full

of blue darners and fugue
suspended in vitro

like secret slow
bubbles. Here, light stretches,

glossal bands doubling
me in currents.

Ink, this empyrean estuary.
Hair slicing my neck in pluvial,

iridescent threads as I walk
this floor of turquoise, soporific

ruin, this bent, blue
note.