The Mask of Io

Let's workshop this poem about acne vulgaris

The Mask of Io

This closeup of Jupiter’s most infernal moon
has roused up a horror long dormant. Here
in hand is my uncle’s face that big-interview
dawn, shaved of its chest-to-eyes coat. He stands
carnelian before my grandmother, bluffing
unaware of first-grade me and my frozen gaze.
She tags on un-tongue-dabbed clumps of tissue 
to stanch pus-blood seep from razor-nicked cysts.
She flattens his cowlick with licked fingers
and fixes his collar, framing the mask of Io.

Were Io to escape the grip of the colossus
and become asteroid, some grand 5608 Olmos,
its surface would indeed become all-too-Olmos.
Were it no longer flexed molten as it is now,
when only the tug from moons of outer shells 
stops it from spiraling down the gravity well,
its surface would be my uncle’s face today:
reposed with recessed fibrotic scars, calderas,
and no more red from walnut swells with plugs
black in grand pores and pockets yellow-green.

This poem was published in Tennessee’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology (2018)

Photo of Io and Edward James Olmos