Sonnet for Her

Kara van de Graaf

There is a brief hourbefore I cover the nakedness of my headwhen I am myself alone, the anglesof my face strange and warpedin the mirror. I don't recognizewho I am without the camouflageof a wig anymore. I touch her hair,I am wooed by the softness of whatwas grown for me by another host,something dead still mergingme with another—the one who wasmy surrogate, eating in a different room,wrapping her newly bare skullwith a printed cloth. I dress in darkness, thenstitch another woman to my body.

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Photo of Kara van de Graaf

Kara van de Graaf is the author of Spitting Image, winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Award in poetry. Her poems appear in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, AGNI, New England Review, and elsewhere. She an Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University.

Cover of the Summer 2023 issue of the Southern Review

Summer 2023

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana State University

Co-Editor & Poetry Editor
Jessica Faust

The Southern Review is one of the nation’s premiere literary journals. Hailed by Time as “superior to any other journal in the English language,” we have made literary history since our founding in 1935. We publish a diverse array of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the country’s—and the world’s—most respected contemporary writers.

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