‘Portrait’
— Hannah Cohen
if they can’t / find my body, reconstruct me. i want to be a doll
Lauren Milici’s poems are a kind of dreamscape I’m not sure I ever want to return from. Her poem ‘Portrait’ straddles the line between the painful wake of living and the darkness that filters in through the mundane and unobserving. The curve of “p” sounds create sensuality and softness as we read words like “panties”, “polaroid”, palms”.
The fragility of items such as cotton, eggshells and dishes indeed create the representation of a person we can see in our minds. We can see the striking beauty that can be found in eyes described as “blue-green marbles / from an old children’s game”. Every line is deliberately indented and arranged to tighten the emotional grasp on the reader, never letting us go.