SANDRA ANFANG
Come as You Are
Come to the party
wear your blanched jeans
sun-seared to silk
an arranged marriage of knee and rock.
Bring your piano hands
burnished with soil
your compost-painted fingers
cupping a mug to keep you warm
I’ll watch truth roll from your tongue
your voice a page of pale green words
stained with sour grass
your chin a looking glass for buttercups.
Bring your perfumed breath
essence of onion and honest toil
simmered in the furrowed field
back bent like the winter birch.
Don’t forget your coal-daubed feet
fresh from the ashes
stories secreted
in the knotholes of your toes.
Bring your hair, dandelion-twined
spider webs that ride your cuffs
sow bug and dung beetle dreaming
in the pocket of your grandmother’s apron.
Always pack your wind-chiseled heart
its needlepoint of scars and stitches.
Please don’t clean up
come as you are.
All Hallow’s Eve
after “Suzanne,” by Leonard Cohen
We met at a party
eyes arcing across the room
like arrows before
our feet could follow suit.
Our masks bowed to each other
all namaste and openness
behind blackened slits
darker still in yellow light.
Later, though we tried,
we couldn’t figure out
how to take them off.
Your smile etched itself
on my irises. Weeks later
I couldn’t shake
the memory of you
your hands like a hospice nurse’s
gentling my forearm
Leonard’s lyrics
burned into my brain:
I want to travel with you
and I want to travel blind
and I think maybe I can trust you
’cause you’ve touched my perfect body
with your mind.
Sandra Anfang is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and visual artist. Her work has been published in many journals, including Unbroken, Rattle, The New Verse News, and Spillway. Her chapbook, Looking Glass Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Road Worrier: Poems of the Inner and Outer Landscape(Finishing Line Press, 2018) was a Lorien Prize finalist. Her full-length poetry collection, Xylem Highway, was published in 2019 by Main Street Rag. Sandra has been nominated for a Best Short Fictions award, Best of the Net, and a Pushcart Prize. She is founder and host of the monthly series, Rivertown Poets, and a California Poet/Teacher in the Schools. When she’s not writing, she is walking the hills of Sonoma County, lost in a daydream. You can see more of her work at sandeanfangart.com.