Anne Menasché
A Brief Meditation on Why I Cannot Stop Watching Say Yes to the Dress
Consider the sea, the white horizon.
Between you and the horizon, the sky
pregnant with clouds slanting blue, like shadows.
In this strange distance, everything
shrinks until you could hold it, the clamshell
halved off its hinges opened to your tracing
finger exploring the wet, smooth blankness: once
this held a living creature, its pink pouch
of organs untouched except, perhaps,
by grains of sand. On another day,
you might have taken home a mesh bag full
of littlenecks and cooked them in broth and white wine.
But in the bright light of the grocery store,
there would have been no sea, no white horizon.
In Response to Seeing a Bag of Garbage
on the Side of the Road
You false opossum. At first I believe you
to be filled with bones, a bear bag of organs
unburst. Instead, you are plastic beached
on the shoulder, shuddering in the wake
of the station wagon as though suffering
a bad thought’s passing. Would you yield to a stick
struck against your bloated gut? I imagine not.
You are too full of bad dreams. I know because at home
I fill my cabinets with them, crinkling
white and wheezing. I stuff dream inside dream.
I tell myself I will use them later.
I tell myself that when I am ready
to move, I will need them to pack my dishes, my dreams
still sticky with residue from other dreams.
Sheep in the Field
The train drags me like labored breath
through blue hills. Ridges cast fickle shadows on the dells
while the sun sputters, a candle with a trick wick
that will not blow out until water
is clutched to the flame. Out of dusk I see them gather
like stars, a galaxy’s twisting arm
held together by a force they don’t understand
and cannot name but must obey
by putting forward hoof after hoof, twin toes
by the dozen scratching their silent language
into the mountain’s muddy thigh
as they climb toward night’s crown, away
from the hound’s shout echoing through the dark,
across the fence, meters and more meters gone.
Anne Menasché is a writer based in Washington, D.C. Her work has recently appeared in publications including ballast, Frontier Poetry, The Garlic Press, River Heron Review, Sublunary Review, and storySouth.