In Her Image
by Sandra McPherson
French postcard, circa World War I
In agreeing to be the crucified woman,
she knew she would need to hang there
with no pockets, no purse, no pearls.
She would know how to stretch into it
when the time came. Did she enjoy
an innate ballerina who could express
befitting grace? While still her bearing
should look disciplinary, chastening.
Express duress. She must suffer
while blooming with a boast of pulchritude
the lighting director could work with.
At the tryouts, the rest of us were already
too mangled with practice nails, and slivers.
She stepped right up, and now she is holding on.
Jesus as evangelist from girlhood, a young savant
known for finespun sayings and secrecy
revealed as sorrow. Her death would fall
somewhere in her menstrual cycle.
Her belly invites most — soft and so
slightly split into those two lobes
which make apricots and peaches
superior to the moon. Lustrous,
a stage-curtain rope knots right over
pubic hair. Feet bound with ribbon,
a satin tether to appeal to some, she
ails ungaunt, her edges sled-round,
cambered. Coifed in the same style
as her carnality: in even waves, marcelled.
Are agony’s good looks art’s job,
or labor’s contract, or sex’s by swoon?
Whatever, they’re hers. And the age’s.
Real senselessness, stupefying power
over lives, eventually tore men’s
faces off. Their leaders made millions
rot millions. Many choked on rats’ mud.
Flies had no teeth for skulls
so there it stopped. What did this have to do
with our sacrificing, sacrificing our breasts
barely between a triangle of bleeding nails?
How we numbed evil. How unbearable
we made goodness feel.
Sandra McPherson has twenty collections published, 5 with Ecco, 3 with Wesleyan, 2 with Illinois, and 2 with Ostrakon. New work appears in Field, The Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Plume, and Poetry. She taught for 23 years at UCDavis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. Her new collection, Quicksilver, Cougars, and Quartz is scheduled for 2018 from Salmon Poetry Press. She is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist. "In Her Image" was first published in Ploughshares.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition — more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.