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\n\n\n\n\nNaked April<\/h4>\n\nI was thinking of myth versus history and\nthat sour coffee we drank in the little patio-thing\n\nbeside the parking lot where\na woman had made a kind of nest\n\nof plastic bags she had shredded almost\nneatly. I was thinking how they called those\n\nbags \u201cNew Mexico roses\u201d for how they clustered\non the fences of barbed wire where the\n\nshrikes hung the shriveled mice they caught in\ntheir razored claws, eviscerated\n\nwith their razor beaks. I was thinking of\nBob Dylan singing about taking the\n\nbadges off, and what badges I might want\nabruptly removed. The badge of you like a mouse\n\nhead, blue and bled, or a bleeding-heart flower\nwith a tongue inside like the head of\n\nOrpheus, who would not stop singing\ndespite the evisceration of the body, despite the\n\nno body, despite the running, running water.\nI was thinking of Persephone, and her face\n\nin that statue is Ashmolean Museum, how\nlike a girl behind any drug store counter\n\nshe appears expectant, also horrified. Who knew it\nwould come to this? I was thinking of your\n\nhard sad mind and that I did not ever look\nonce pretty enough, but I was pretty inside.\n\nI was thinking what it would be after I died,\nand how like a God I would watch on high\u2014\n\nonly memory, winds unreeling, plastic bags,\nso much with no road that ends, ribbons, and\n\nOrpheus again, and what is it, tell me,\nto sing as we did?\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\n\nFear Food<\/h4>\n\nShe will make nothing from something,\nthe bread in her fingers, the six carrot slices,\nshe will work them like a magician\nuntil they are almost air, until\nthe light that is outside her is all she is\u2014\nuntil she is like the moon that has no light\nof her own. Owl moon, savage moon, the\nhunter who drives herself until she is arrow.\nAnd the stories that speak of this\u2014crumbs\nfor the birds, and then small white stones.\nAnd the sugar house, with the witch inside\nit, and the oven, who asks her only if she\nwould like to look inside, just a moment.\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/pre>\n
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\nSheila Black is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Iron, Ardent<\/em>. A co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability<\/em>, she divides her time between San Antonio, Texas and Washington, DC, where she works at AWP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Naked April | Fear Food<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}