and you see yourself sing
when your mouth moves in a
mirror, do you marvel to hear it when you barely
know the next note? speak with your reflected mouth
agape i promise the song will come back to you from
somewhere in the vast where between about after
and about before. some spirit possesses your mouth
and you’ll be given the content of your creation;
you’ve always known this song. in some version of
this story, you even penned it and all you needed is
that first find at the piano with you and yourself and
the vibration of your throat, a full confession at the
foot of the sink’s basin to conjure the page number in
your mind’s missal. your voice/image is a triptych
once you rise to the mirror: you and you in the mirror
and you together and do you fear it, the recognition
in your pupils? the holiness in you? do you die,
an insurmountable joy wells at calling and having had
some grand answer?
Jasmine Tabor is a writer from the deep south. She is a Mellon Mays Graduate Fellow, a recipient of the Edith A. Hambie Poetry Prize from Spelman College, and received her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. Her works appear in Poets.org, Michigan Literary Review, Agnes Scott Literary Journal, among others. Jasmine is the author of the chapbook Mirror Myths (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and a 2021 Best of the Net award nominee. She served as Salt Hill Journal’s editor-in-chief in 2022, was a Stove Works resident and Meacham fellow in 2023, and in 2024 was the Vermont Studio Resident. She currently lives in Charleston, SC revising her first manuscript and working on her second.
