Volume 78, 2026
DOI: 10.18422/78-2673
© Göttingen University Press

Portrait of My Daughter at Eleven (after Rilke)

Sylee Gore

Your eye a camera. Your forehead touching

something distant. Your mouth immensely

mobile, drawing light. Peony cotton,

buttercup. Angled elbow, knee.

Beneath your feet, sand. Beyond, pines and sea.

Your face invisible

as if you see through a sight, past

my chamber, a vanishing future –

your still unprinted photograph

in my yet-fading hand

About the author

Sylee Gore is a U.S. National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Poetry and won the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction. Poems from her first poetry chapbook, Maximum Summer (2025, Nion/Atelos), have been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish. A multimedia artist, she has taught for Kundiman and Oxford Poetry Society, and exhibited in Brussels and London. Her selected visual poems and a book of her photography are forthcoming.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.