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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

© Bicoastal Review 2025. All rights reserved.

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