Anne Menasché
ROASTING THE CHICKEN AFTER HE’S LAID HANDS ON ME
I envy her unselfconsciousness, as if she’s used to posing
like this, one leg crocked
at an angle, the other poised in air, her cavity
and its dark mysteries unguarded now
I’ve pulled away the plastic pouch filled
with the pink pulse of her gizzards. I bathe her, scrub her
with salt, anoint her with oil. Her flesh
barely argues my fear of the black nothing
that holds my whole hand and in which I feel her emptiness
and her bones. How can I keep her tender
even after the oven, when she is no longer translucent
like an awkward, stubbled pearl? Even arranged upside down
she toughens to take the knife when I want
to prove that I no longer see blood.
THE WATER GLASS SPEAKS TO THE ARTIST
After Peter Dreher’s series of paintings, Tag Um Tag Ist Guter Tag
Once, your lips pressed against me, my cold flank
slipped your sweating palms. Every morning I tipped
toward you and the heat of your eager
tongue and the sour flatness of your breath
and emptied like the dark had emptied
from night until all that remained was a lens
of memory deep within me, the last
traces of your dreams that you couldn’t yet reach.
One day you thrust your wet hand through my mouth
and turned me over, and I looked at nothing
until you turned me again and left me
standing. Here in this room, grey nearness shifts
and presses indistinctly against me from the corners.
When you look at me, I cast shadows.
Anne Menasché grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley. She studied literature at the University of Virginia and now lives in Washington, D.C. Her work has previously appeared in Town Creek Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and The Garlic Press.