Self Portrait as a Bag of Breast Milk in a Restaurant Freezer

Taped shut inside a Miami Beach
gift shop bag

that once held a ballerina pink
woven bracelet with a pineapple charm

almost sentient, peered at through the heart-
shaped sunglasses I will return

to the rack with their twins, you are the pigeon at the edge
of the hotel pool,

the strawberry sliced into a star
piercing the tongue.

You sleep near the ringlets of shrimp and the ice
that remembers freedom.

I, too, once lived in the skin, near the tidal swish
of veins. Tingled and pressed.

The wet teeth that parted, open. The mouth
an aria has floated through.

---

Listen

---

Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir, The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024). Her poetry books and chapbooks are City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), and Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013). She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and lives in Brooklyn, NY on the unceded homeland of the Lenape People.