The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2020

If I Draw Several Faces, Will They Help Me Know My Own? Rhiannon Conley I have a nose, a haircut. I put on lipstick the color of my own lips. It’s a face and I make it every day. None of this gives me any feeling, any sense of knowing who I am. The cliché, the self-help class — Empower Yourself! Love Yourself! — look at your own vagina. So, squatted over a mirror with a flashlight, instructions for a quest: Cherchez la femme — your soul, truest you. Breathing softly the incense fogged air as you lean into a cave entrance illuminated by scented-candle light. I think you’re supposed to cry. Maybe I don’t love me. Maybe I’m not supposed to cry. The cave has a figure, has features: sharp, steepled stalagmite, canine stalactite dangling; a river of pale, brackish water. There are cave drawings, but I’ve forgotten what they look like, probably smudges, probably The Meadow 199