Proem
I became myself.
I became myself.
No, I always was myself.
There’s no such person as myself.
I wouldn’t have to turn my eye
inward, I thought, if I could train my eye
on him—the one I loved
But I was wrong. My eye loved
everything it fell upon.
And then one day it fell upon
a mirror. And he was nowhere
in the mirror. And she was everywhere.
From Couplets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) by Maggie Millner. Used with the permission of the publisher.
Maggie Millner
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, Bomb magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was the 2020–21 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University and the 2019–20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. She is currently a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at The Yale Review.