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You are here: Home / Poetry / Aging, Is My Own Face

Aging, Is My Own Face

Poetry by Vinitia Swonger

Sensing me in the doorway, my mother wakes with a start.
Am I having another heart attack, she asks.
I can’t remember where I’m supposed to be.

You’ve been asleep a long time, I say.
The shape of her face, so square and aging, is my own face.

She sits up and I see a tessellation of brown down scatter,
her dark flight feathers rumpled with sleep.

I try to push forward through the doorway,
but the space between us is filled with thick gel dotted with egg shell.

Damn, she seems as confused as I am.

Aren’t you supposed to have a more complete understanding now, I ask.
Isn’t that the point of those stories we tell ourselves.

I don’t recognize you, she says,
the way you’re wearing your hair now, it’s different.

I’m wearing it like you used to.

I didn’t expect you to start looking so much like me, she says.
I didn’t expect this moment to be about hairstyles, I say.


Vinitia Swonger’s videography career influences her writing, which explores visual meaning. A communitarian, she runs mixed-genre salons. Vinitia sings with an improv group, writing and performing songs on the spot. Picture musical slam poetry generated in a collective. Her work appears in Abstract Magazine, Contrary, SLICE, and Storm Cellar.

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Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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