A Poet Reflects

I’m telling you it’s cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

—Denis Johnson, from “The White Fires of Venus” in The Incognito Lounge: And Other Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994)

Painting on photograph: Kim Weston, Painted Nude #80, n.d.