Send Nudes

I took a self-timed portrait as Diana.
I took the plot toward the falls.

I took myself. In braided laurels
the naked day arranged its light around my ears

to make my face a knife.
As I bathed I watched the white line

of my figure skirt with light strained
through the false aperture of pines.

I wasn’t alone. I kept company with myth
because even my solitude has memories.

Even my whiteness has an ombudsman
eager to strip me of tenor while calling

the woods unmarked. By the pool stood
a tree with bark thickened in labial strips

around its oblong hollow. The falls, a bugle
announcing itself and pulling the sound

into two ribbons of river. I made me
the hunter watching from the trees

and then I killed him. That’s the point
of hunting.

Katherine Gibbel is a poet whose work has been published in the Chicago Review, jubilat, Sixth Finch and elsewhere. She edits Send Me Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Windsor, VT.

“Send Nudes” was originally published in Bat City Review Issue 14.