Self Portrait by Fran Schumer

Fran Schumer | February 10th, 2023 | poetry | 1 Comment

Poet Bio

My mother said don’t marry
a man who’s good looking,

Corollaries abound:
don’t marry anyone who
cares about your looks,
nudges you to lose weight,
dye your hair.

Well maybe I looked okay
back then but boy did I let things slide.…
Now old hag, chin-haired and all —
I look so bad it’s funny

On his phone a picture of me,
all varicose veins on a motorbike;
on his computer, me in a huge sombrero
at some tourist spot in Santa Barbara.

Anyone, even you —
looking at these pictures
would know this man loves me

Poet Bio

Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She won a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and in 2021, a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. In 2022, her poem, Memento Mori, was a winner of the Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate’s 2022 Contest. Her Chapbook, Weight, was the first runner up in the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest and was published in 2022 by Choeofpleirn Press. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political science at college but wishes she had spent more time studying Keats.

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