Epithalamium, with images from the Brothers Grimm
The French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant has complete feeling in the new tissue five months after the operation, she told a Sunday newspaper. Isabelle Dinoire, 38, also told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the hardest part of her recovery appears to be getting to know herself again. When asked if she has accepted her new face, she responded: “It’s too difficult to explain.”
Prince Charming A bad week. She swallowed pills, eight little erasers
& while she lay on the floor with her mind elsewhere, the golden Lab
brought his famished tongue across her face. Unclipped toe-
nails click on the cold linoleum as the dog goes
to his bed, comes back for another lick, & finally begins to nibble.
He starts with the lips, like any faithful lover. That faint half-smile.
Mirror, mirror
The only mirror she kept
in her apartment
lies face-down when not in use.
Every day she checks a small flag of skin that the doctors implanted
right above her navel: white or gray would signal surrender. Every day
when she pulls up her blouse, she feels something turn over inside,
some phantom embryo forming without nose or chin, the mouth
a permanent wound no lips can ever hope to zipper shut.
Cinderella story
The organ
donor’s face comes
slowly back to life.
Too young to have had laugh lines or crows’ feet,
it was smooth & as firm at first as a glass slipper.
Now, after the delicate diplomacy of scalpel and suture,
the awkward wedding over, it slowly fills once again with feeling,
softens in the heat of an unfamiliar dance.
An epithalamium is a wedding poem. For a brief history of the form, see here.