ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Anna Cabe is an MFA candidate in fiction at Indiana University and the nonfiction editor of Indiana Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bitch, The Toast, SmokeLong Quarterly, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Cleaver, and HEArt Journal, among others. She was a 2015 Kore Press Short Fiction Award semifinalist, a finalist for Midwestern Gothic's Summer 2016 Flash Fiction Series, and a finalist for the 2015 Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers.
Also by Anna Cabe:
When Does Your Name Stop Being Funny?
To The Full Professor Who Told Me, A Teaching Assistant, To Grow A Thicker Skin After The Inauguration
To Eve and Snow White and Bad Apples
diptych with two girls
after Maggie Yee
i.
girl with the cherries ripe and red is supine — an odalisque. you want to paint her but she put a spell on you — her hair transforms into a nest of thorns on your canvas. your blood pinpricks all over it like freckles. girl is a witch is a sorceress is an enchantress. those cherries drip-drop into the cauldron. the pits choke you. her fingers around your neck. your eyes see only shadows.
ii.
skull-faced girl is the phantom in your crawlspace. skull-faced girl slams your grandmother’s china to the tiles. skull-faced girl swings on the chandelier slides down the bannister sticks her fingers in the apple pie. skull-faced girl roars out of the embers. skull-faced girl whispers in your ears at dawn. skull-faced girl clothes herself in your cast-off linens dyed with period blood. skull-faced girl says boo to the trick-or-treaters. skull-faced girl sticks her tongue out under the mistletoe. skull-faced girl is a girl is a ghost is a girl is a ghost is a girl. skull-faced girl slides into the mirror. skull-faced girl reads the lines on your face. skull-faced girl tells you your future in tea leaves in smashed glass in crystal balls in dirty laundry in your irises in graveyard dirt in your ear at midnight too low to catch.
For National Poetry Writing Month, I was working on a series of daily poems responding to art by Asian/Asian diaspora artists. I was immediately drawn to Maggie Yee's work, particularly The Virgin Rests On Her Bruised Cherries Pondering Fashion and With the Wind Through Your Bones Your Spirit Leaves without You.
You can call me someone interested in gurlesque. My aunt, when she made me wax my underarms for the first time, told me that "You must suffer pain to be beautiful." I'd add to that that beauty can be a form of a power, and these two paintings immediately suggested to me some binaries women are often forced into: you're either beautiful or not beautiful, you're either a slut or a prude. And since I took inspiration for this work from visual art, I immediately thought to call this a diptych. And why not? You can call this poem an altarpiece for two kinds of dangerous femininity, whose teeth flash in the dark.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
