What Would a Woman
Without needle nose pliers what could a 72-year-old
woman do? A woman who decides to add
mushrooms to her bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich
after googling psilocybin research articles, thinking
she might try it. How could such a woman live
comfortably alone, how could she without a
power drill she doesn’t use but offers to the young man
who visits her in her third floor walkup to screw
her dragon to the wall and ceiling . . . how could
she navigate without her phone, her pocket
device, that knows everything about her except
how it feels when she touches herself on the breast,
fingertips to the inner thigh, brushes her own
cheek, violet-blue, how soft it is still, how it
gives life all its value—what would she do?
Chimera
Little monument to the play of life—
why the artists hoard discarded
things, dried up things, broken
things, incomplete, disassembled,
dying things still moist. Twigs,
feather, skull, ribs, seed pods,
vertebrae, pebbles, shells, claw,
torn bits of paper, twisted roots,
leaves, crumpled lichen.
Inexplicable until connection rings
in the brain, tickles the synapses,
this recombinant chimera, tangle
of roots become tangle of arms,
tangle of arms reaching and grabbing,
pushing away and pulling back, weave
of limbs, calligraphy, tangle of thoughts
of the encounter with the body,
its scoured driftwood and polished
horn, soft beige and a rainbow of gray,
fuse. What intimacy. Who confronts
who confronts whom? Where does
one body begin the other end if
there are two?
A chimera: recombinant creature of Greek
dreams; a fire-breathing woman created from
a lion’s head, body of a goat, ending in
serpent’s tail. Chimera: an illusion.
Chimera: a body composed of cells, genetically
distinct, coming from different individuals
Many of us contain at least a few living cells
from another person.
Blurred Translation of Paul Celan’s Sprich Auch Du
Speak as you ought to speak all of it lighter, dine on spinach speech.
Speak— but shade dowses not the no from the yes. Give them speech awkward as sin: give in to shattered.
Give into shattered enough give in so well as you ought to to keep it straight weight swishing midnight to midday to midnight.
Bleakness under: see, its leavening word rings— Beam, death! Leavening! Where we spoke, where scattered speaks.
None after slumps the speech, where do you stand: Within jest, shatteredblotted, where in? Lay siege, taste and pour. Dinner first you, unkenneled, finer! Finer: a feather, and then an herbwillow leaf, boatbackwards: Unintended it goes swimming under, woe, to a such a shimmering sight, in the drowning wandering word.
Anne Becker is author of three books of poetry, Human Animal, The Good Body, and The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin. She was Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD, for four years and then, Poet-in-Residence at Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center. Her poems printed on her own handmade paper have been exhibited in the US and Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. She is a poetry editor of the Mid-Atlantic Review, an arts journal based in Washington, DC. Always interested in collaborating with other artists, most recently, commissioned by Carl Banner, director of Washington Musica Viva, she wrote a long poem “ The Jamie Raskin Oratorio,” which was set to music by composer Noam Faingold. This premiered September, 2024, with Carl Banner on piano and Chris Royal playing trumpet accompanying her reading.