by Emily Blair

"I-Special” is the title
of a charcoal drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe.
“If that’s not what’s inside us I don’t know what is,”
says one woman gallery-goer to another,
who replies that she was thinking the same thing.
To me it looks like the letter “I,”
which seems even more bold and embarrassing.
That’s why in poetry we call it “the speaker.”
A little symbolic distance, like when the gynecologist
drapes a paper cloth over my thighs.
A friend reminds me that all poems
are persona poems, including this one.
“I” is a fiction, “you” is a fiction,
and so is “the speaker,” popping up
out of the ground like the undead
at the poem’s start. I’m reminded of
a video I checked out of the library
years ago. Actors in chunky sweaters
walked around the Lake District
reciting the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth
as if they thought it up on the spot.
How can you tell the lyric I from the confessional I?
Does it depend on who’s talking?
And if we think we know what’s inside them?
The figure in “I-Special” has a little loop at the top.
It could be a sardine can key, or a tent stake.
It could be a vagina.
It could be a shape
saying something
we have no words for.






Note: Alfred Stieglitz is supposed to have said upon first seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, “Finally, a woman on paper!” Georgia O’Keeffe herself said of her work, “I found I could say things with colors and shapes I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for.”

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Emily Blair lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, Sixth Finch, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and The Gettysburg Review, among many other places. She has received New York Foundation of Arts Fellowships in both Poetry and Fiction.