Two Poems from Stephanie Anderson

Boticelli Strip Tease

She can not trust her clothes
to remain faithful
when they're made of something flimsy
like cotton.

The softest parts of her skin dimple through.

She knows they want someone
with smaller thighs, less bouffant bosoms,
but her bones layer themselves in flanks of mare,
while a sloth of dark hair combs her fat neck.

She is a marriage of skin on skin.

Her menses of felled trust
halo her head.

Boticelli gives it a color like gold,
and makes love to the deities
of her form.

She becomes aware;
she is an ecclesiastical beauty.

She begrudges her clothing,
and learns herself intimately.




Exotic

My heart was born in a laundromat
to Saturday's child;
my first cry was for household cleaners,
rubber gloves, and bandanas.

I grew to collect bills like postcards,
use rupee, rand, koruny,
marks and rubles to pay them.

I have never seen these places,
or climbed their red slanting roofs.

I never travel far,

just to the gravel road
on the other side of the fence,

barefoot
down by the hens,
their nest-covered dishes
and folk art.

Momma loves when they peck
my hands for breakfast
instead of hers.

I eat my mother's weeds
like her tangled up children
and honeysuckles,
wear my evening in heliotrope.

I skip out on her,
learn proper how to love a man.


Stephanie Bryant Anderson lives in Tennessee. She leads a simple life with her two boys. Her writing has most recently been published in The Sow's Ear Poetry Review and Danse Macabre, and she has work forthcoming in Full of Crow. Stephanie co-edits Up the Staircase.

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