Natalie Rice is the author of Nightjar (Gaspereau Press, 2025), Scorch (Gaspereau Press, 2023) and the chapbook 26 Visions of Light (2020). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Event Magazine, The Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Terrain.org. She lives in Nova Scotia, Canada.
“This three part poem responds to and reimagines the self-portraits taken by Francesca Woodman. The scenes in the poem draw on an untitled photograph (1978) from Eel Series, Rome 1977-1978. The image shows the headless body of Woodman on a tile floor, her body somewhat blurred out by her movements as if in the action of becoming an eel. She slips in and out of form. Additionally, I borrow imagery from Untitled, Rome, Italy (1977-1978), where Woodman is seen hanging from a doorframe, her face turned to the side. The single stanza of each poem acts like a lens or a window, providing a small lyric portrait of a photographic image. These poems, like Woodman’s photographs, form and deform, dissolve and construct ideas around what composes self-portraiture and the self.”
She was on the porch looking in. A bowl
on a white enamel table with one perfect
eel coiled there. Beyond the table heat rose
from the stove. The house had two stories. Upstairs,
two people slept. Sometimes, they touched
each other in the dark—made shapes
with their hands and teeth
so that all the little moths against the windows
opened their wings. The night, thrummed
and warm. Through the window she could see
them moving under white sheets.
She was standing in a room, looking away.
Her face blurred when she shook her head no
as the shutter clicked. She hung
her clothes on small pegs, naked except
for checkered stockings. Everything in the room
breathed slowly. In the photograph
she is in there, but no one can see her yet.
The flowers in the garden hung like little
bats. She made the shape of the voice that talked
to her but only
in her head. Her feet across the tile floor.
On the chair, was a folded white
cloth. When she lifted herself into the doorframe,
she dangled by her fingertips: the light
from outside, distant, distorted. The same way
the pond holds my image in its mouth.
