Reclining Janus, Nude
Alison Rumfitt
Reclining nude doublefaced lady on a psychologist’s carved table,
Suited psychologist sitting three to four meters away
with a notebook in his hand and his arousal muttering,
Reclining nude Janus looks this way and that says
don’t think much of your office sir, well that’s down to you
says he, he’s got the kind of blue eyes that make you hate a man
that say, I have thoughts on you that even you cannot
understand. Time for a drawing of your minds.
Reclining naked lady with two sets of eyes noses mouths
eyebrows hairlines plaits rosy cheeks acne scarring
sharp chins, what are you thinking he thinks, he would like
to take the skull he keeps next to her on his desk
and smash in her head with it. He would then sift through it all
all the thoughts that came spilling out onto his nice rug
to find the little pearly jewels she keeps in there the secrets
to how a Janus thinks. It does not occur to him to ask but
she wouldn’t want to tell in any case.
She wraps up in clothes, standing female forwardbackwards
dressing, then in a large faux fur coat and out of his office
down the street, good thing is that people don’t like to stare
because they know she’s always watching.
She keeps two part time jobs.
She is a midwife at a small private medical facility,
She also does gardening for a hospice.
In both of these positions despite her unusual appearance she has
achieved great acclaim, because she has unique understanding
of beginnings and endings, the way we wish to first be born forth
and the way that baby may wish to then end hopefully a long time since
one of her faces smokes, the other complains she’s ruining her own lungs,
The psychologist theorises that the faces are separate beings:
this is false, they are the same, so how can the same being believe
that smoking is both at once good and bad?
He cannot hold two ideas inside his head at once but she can.
Reclining female Janus nude in her own home on her own couch
half smoking half drinking cold water to get rid of the aftertaste
she is thinking about being at a halfway point. A living crossroad.
Her story begins as it ends and ends as it begins,
She slouches down to a laptop, writes out a sentence that
erases itself immediately. Deletes it. It appears again.
It goes like this There was a girl who knew everything but wished
that she was as dumb as the man in her life,
and it concluded much the same.
Alison Rumfitt is a 19-year-old transgender writer who studies English literature in Brighton, U.K. She loves, amongst other things, forests, folklore, gothic romance and wild theories about her favourite authors being trans. Her poetry has previously been published in Liminality, cahoodaloodaling and Words Dance. Her poem “Only Trans Girl at the Party” was nominated for a 2017 Bettering American Poetry Award. You can find her on Twitter at @gothicgarfield, on Tumblr at mrsdewinter.tumblr.com and performing live readings regularly in Brighton and London.