POSTHUMOUS PORTRAIT
DISGUISED AS A
WRITING PROMPT

ELLA FLORES

After Jean Fouquet’s Melun Diptych

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Start yourself small: a grey left breast for example

so swollen with mercury and oil you thinned

all you fed. Keep safe in second person, or else others

will do it for you. Earn your title and if appropriate

adopt the form spilling tension of a bodice, as yours.

“Scandal” and “fuckery” will only get you so far—

as mistress you have influence, can walk a fine line

break as Joan did at Orléans. No matter you must be

kept virgin, kept vulgar by nine angel vanguard,

consider the conflicting accounts of your death

a compliment. So far removed from personhood

even this You can’t command, merely suggest.

Pose yourself as the question, writer: who

hinges on these severed halves of unholy lactation?

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Ella Flores is a PhD poetry student at SUNY Binghamton and has had work appear in Hunger Mountain, Salamander, The Summerset Review and South Carolina Review.