My soft-sunken field of a face forms sandy hollows where fears and follies roil and rest, remarks tingle, digits stray. When my tongue staccato is quelled, my hands prop up my cheek bones and bracket the wrinkles that travel from my nose to sketch my chin, furrows where the seeds of new banter are incubated before sprouting in my mouth. My long gazes at the corners of rooms where walls meet ceilings and at distant horizons and at puddles and at tree bark and at crowds can distract interlocutors from my facial topography, and from their own. From “What do you think?” and “How do you feel?” From “Have I told you this before?” and “Listen to this.” and “Tell me, tell me now.”

—After Gazing Head, 1929 (plaster coated with a parting compound and pencil traces), by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)

Sharon Roseman

is a multi-genre author and Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University. She is based in St. John’s, Canada. Some of her recent work can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, Mobilities, SurVision Magazine, and The Memory Palace anthology.